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HARVEST

OF
HORROR:

MASS MURDER
IN HOUSTON

BY DAVID HANNA

BELMONT TOWER BOOKS • NEW YORK CITY

A BELMONT TOWER BOOK— January 1975

Published by
Belmont Tower Books
1S5 Madison Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10016

Printed in theU&ited States of America

PART ONE

Twenty-Six Murders Plus One

"About 99.9 percent of the runaways today turn
out to be alive and well and happy wherever they
want to be. But those other few— they're the ones
who turn up in shallow graves. "'—Captain R. L.
Borton, head of the Missing Persons Detail, Hous-
ton, Texas.

"I killed several of them myself with Dean's gun
and helped him choke some others. Dean would
have sex with the boys, then he would kill them." We
took them and buried them in different places."

When he got used to the idea that he had become
someone special, Wayne Henley didn't mind talking
to either the police or reporters as he led them to the
shallow graves of twenty-six boys, between the ages
of thirteen and twenty, who had been the victims, of
the most hideous mass murder in modern American
history,

The eighteen year old high-school dropout had
always been a talkative boy, curious, bright, alert.
Leaning against one of the sea of police cars sur-
rounding the L-shaped Southeast Boat sheds, a dry

land marina in Southwest Houston where police
found the first eight of the decomposed corpses
killed by Henley's thirty-three year old companion,
Dean Corll, the youth might have been one of mil-
lions of American kids, still a boy, not yet a man,
awkward, sometimes sullen; often, bright-eyed and
cheery. As he talked to the reporters clustered at his
feet, Wayne tried to be both. There were moments
when he managed complete control of himself,
drawling his tale of degeneracy and murder in a dry,
cold-as-steel monotone. Then, suddenly, he was
someone else — a pale, frail, frightened and torment-
ed youth unable to subdue the hysteria churning in-
side him. His words became an unintelligible mum- 1
ble.

The hot, humid air that hung over the prairie-like
.area had matted his shoulder-length thick, brown
hair. The lank hair kept falling across his face and
down to his chin. He would shake it away with a
peculiar toss of the head. Hours without sleep or
respite from tension had rimmed his brown eyes
with splotches of red. The blue jump-suit issued to
him earlier in the day at the Pasadena Police Sta-
tion hung loosely on his medium-height, one
hundred-and-thirty pound frame. The boy f s pock-
marked face, shadowed by a wisp of a goatee and
light moustache, looked ashen and drawn. His nico-
tine-stained fingers lunged hungrily at the steady
stream of cigarettes offered him by newsmen who
lighted them with studied indifference — as though
furnishing match flares to a handcuffed youth was
the sort of thing they did every day.

When the words gushed out it was as though
young Henley worried he might never have the op-

portunity to say them again, that fay talking he was
purging himself of a nightmare from which he had
suddenly awakened. "I don't care who knows it," he
almost shouted. "I've got to get it off my chest."
Then the words turned into a mumble and the re-
porters strained to hear them. The words formed
images of the twenty-four hours just passed, twenty-
four hours in which a fusillade of bullets had ended
the three-year torture and murder spree of a man to
whom Wayne Henley had been enslaved, physically
and emotionally.

"I woke up and Dean was clamping handcuffs on
me. The other two (Tim Kerley, 19; Rhonda Wil-
liams, 15) were lying on their stomachs, and they
were handcuffed and their feet were tied. I can't
remember whether he tied my feet afterward or
whether they were tied when I woke up. I sweet-
talked him and promised Fd torture them and kill
them if he'd let me go. He was crazy-like, waving a
long knife in one hand; his gun, in the other. He
kept saying that he'd killed boys before, but first he
was going to have his fun.

"To begin with he wanted to kill me. He was mad
because I brought the chick over there. Usually there
were no girls there. Dean only dug boys. The chick
wanted to run away from home, and I was going to
travel with Dean. I thought it was safe. I. didn't
know no better."

"Dean let me up and I got out of the handcuffs.
He took them into the bedroom, stripped them
naked spread-eagle on the floor. He dumped Tim on
his stomach, Rhonda on her back/'

"I told him tp back off and stop what he was
doing. He said something and came at me. That's

when I shot him/*

Police found Dean Corll's nude, blood-drenched
body in the hallway of his one story green and white
frame house, his arms cradling a Princess telephone,
at 2020 Lamar Drive, Pasadena, a residential suburb
of Houston.

His killer had emptied the ejitire cylinder — six
bullets — into the body. This was murder by someone
who had been seized with a huge, overwhelming, in-
sane rage.

The events which led to Dean CorlFs murder in
the early morning hours of August 8 } 1973, had been
fairly commonplace in the lives of the two friends.
There was going to be a party at Lamar Drive — a
shabby sex and drug orgy, really — but Dean and
Wayne preferred to refer to their special evenings as
"parties,". At least that how it had been explained to
the lone invited guest, Tim Kerley, a good4ooking
youth with curly, shoulder-length hair and blue
eyes, wearing braces on his teeth, whom Wayne had
picked up in the Heights section of Houston where
he lived and from which Dean Corll only recently
had moved. The boys had driven to Pasadena in
Kerley's Volkswagen, a beat-up, teenager's vehicle
that served its function, transportation. They ar-
rived at about nine-thirty after Wayne finished his
lesson at a driving school where he had enrolled the
month before.

En route Wayne wasted little thought on what
might happen that night. He told Kerley only essen-
tials, that they'd get high and have fun. Wayne was
especially interested in pleasing Dean right now;

bringing him a "new boy 75 ought to do it. He knew
how Dean felt about having someone new and iresh
around the house. Wayne had been a "new boy"
once himself— more than eighteen months earlier
when he had first met Dean, but that was at another
address, an apartment in the Heights. He had been
invited by David Brooks, his one-time classmate and
Dean's sometime roommate.

Like 'The Man Who Came to Dinner," Wayne
stayed on, not completely displacing David Brooks
in CorlFs furtive, secret world of young boys, but
transforming it into a menage a trais: Brooks, an-
other slender young man with shoulder-length hair,
showed no resentment of Wayne's intrusion. He was
in and out of the apartment all the time although he
had departed Dean's bed and board, ostensibly for
good, after marrying Bridget Clark. Still, it was
clear Wayne had become Number One boy—a
status that filled a need in Wayne's tumbled young
life, the need to feel wanted and to depend on some-
one.

. There were peaks and valleys in their friendship.
Weeks passed when they ignored each other and
there were long periods too when Wayne would have
nothing to do with Brooks. His mother, Mary Hen-
ley, often asked what was wrong, but Wayne never
responded ^with a direct answer. When things were
serene the younger man always spent the weekend .
with Dean. On the evening of August eighth Wayne
telephoned his mother to say that he was staying
with Tim Herley,

There was no reason for him to lie. Mary Henley
approved of his friendship with ^ Corll and realized
what it meant to the oldest of her four sons — an es-

cape from the Heights and the drab life of the people
caught up in it.

From the Heightsy on a clear day, you can see the
towers of the booming downtown district of Houston
rising out of the landscape to the south. The Heights
is one of this new city's older neighborhoods. There
are still shopping centers and big churches left. But
the side streets are run down* given over to the white
laboring class. There are pickup trucks in the drive-
ways, and tires on frayed ropes in the weedy back-
yards.

Older residents most likely moved in from the
country when they were young. They still hold the
values of the farm and the frontier, while their sons
and daughters are caught up in urban complexities.
It is the kind of place where children grow up to be
waitresses or filling station attendants, serving the
people who work in the air-conditioned offices down-
town.

In Houston's gay society, the Heights is also
known as Homo Heights because of the availability
of teenagers like Wayne Henley, high schooi drop-
outs unemployable in skilled crafts, whose pale
thin, poovly nourished bodies can be bought for a
night of sex for a few dollars. They're "trade," male
whores and hustlers in the gay world who are paid to
submit to homosexual encounters. Generally their
homosexual contacts are confined to a passive level,
thus affording them the privilege of stoutly main-
taining their normality and masculinity. Products of
poverty and ignorance, they are as bewildering to
psychiatrists as they are to themselves.

Wayne Henley had frankly hustled Corll since
their first encounter. If he was slavish in his devotion

Wayne also knew how to manipulate his older com-
panion. Wayne's I.Q. was high and there were times
in his school life when his grades and achievements
showed a boy capable of college work. No one knew
better how beguiling Wayne could be than the young
man himself. He learned how to "sweet talk" Corll
because he needed him. Dean's money bought the
few pleasures he sought— beer and pot.

But lately the relationship appeared imperiled.
Another youth had caught Dean's fancy, someone
who also came from the Heights. He has been iden-
tified in the gay sub-culture only as "Guy.*' Wayne
knew very little about him and evidently the affair
had blossomed during one of their periodic spats.
Right now Wayne especially needed to keep things
cool with Dean. He was looking forward to their trip
to Colorado, where Dean intended visiting his
mother., Mary West. Finding Tim had been a stroke
of luck; The blond boy was very much Dean's type.
■ Wayne ought to know, for there had been an unsubt-
le change in their relationship since those days when
Dean paid him five dollars to commit oral sodomy
on him. Wayne had become Dean's procurer.

When the Volkswagen braked to a halt at 2020
Lamar Drive, Wayne saw that Dean was home. His
white van was parked in the driveway; the truck and
its color amounted to Dean's trademark, a throw-
back to the years when his family ran a candy facto-
ry in the Heights. As a kid Dean used to forage in
the woods for the nuts that went into the making of
his mother's pralines. That was when the business
started and she worked out of her kitchen. Then
Dean took over delivery and drove the truck. To
hundreds of Heights kids he was known as The

Candy Man,

Corll was skilled at entertaining young boys, and
Tim was made to feel comfortable. Dean laughed a
lot and appeared to brim over with fun and good
cheer. He stood close to six feet and wore his black,
curly hair short. His two hundred pound frame was
all muscle. His dark eyes alternated between soft
and sensuous and sharp and cruel.

But Corll wasn't for real. He was all artifice— forc-
ing it. He wanted to appear younger than his thirty-
three years— and it showed. There was something
phony in the way he tried to use the slang of today's
young-people. But his young guests weren't percep-
tive enough to notice. They hadn't come to his home
to analyze or to relate. They were there to get high,
and that's how it started that warm August night in
1973,

Wayne and Tim seemed satisfied to sniff the
fumes of paint thinner while Dean smoked pot and
drank beer. That lasted until about midnight when
Wayne announced that he and Tim were going out
for some sandwiches.

Instead Wayne led Tim back to the Heights where
they picked up Rhonda Williams, a girl Wayne had
been seeing a lot of lately. Only fifteen, Rhonda was
extremely well-endowed and could pass herself off as
older. She was a sultry brunette who, in spite of her
rounded-out good looks, was sensible enough not to
want to jump into the adult world too quickly. But
she was in trouble with her family and had been
staying with some people they didn't approve of.
Wayne had told her a lot about the goings-on in
Pasadena, parties and the like. When suddenly he
and Tim were on her doorstep inviting her to one,

Rhonda brightly accepted^

Whether Rhonda grasped the impact of her stir-
prise appearance in Dean Corll's home wasn't re-
corded, but the host was furious. "Why did you
bring that chick here?" Dean demanded. Wayne re-
sorted to "sweet talk" and calmed him down and
the party went right on in the curtained rooms of the
house on Lamar Drive, Eventually the kids passed
out.

It must have been dawn when Wayne felt the cold
steel of handcuffs being locked around his wrists. He
shook himself awake to find Dean standing above
him, pale and white in his nudity.

The events that followed formed the first stage of
Wayne Henley's account to the police and reporters.

Wayne, looking around the room, saw that Kerley
and Rhonda were lying on the floor, their wrists and
ankles shackled, their lips, like his, sealed with
masking tape. Seeing him awgcke, Corll removed the
tape from Wayne's lips. Henley began arguing, Ker-
ley and Rhonda awakened and started to struggle
with the handcuffs,

Corll was like a wild man— swinging a long knife
and pointing his revolver at one and then the other
—shouting and ranting that he had killed before and
could kill again. "But first, I am going to have my
fun," he shouted.

Wayne began w talk—fast. He begged Corll to
simmer down, to free him. He promised to help kill
the others, agreeing to rape Rhonda while Dean per-
formed anal intercourse with the boy. Corll unlocked
Wayne's handcuffs, lifted Kerley and carried him to
the bedroom, returning a few seconds later to move
Rhonda.

Following him into the bedroom Wayne saw that
Kerley was fastened to a board face down. Corll lay
Rhonda on the floor face up. There was a break in
his concentration and he went to the bathroom to
obtain a lubricant for the anal assault.

Wayne realised Corll had left his revolver on a
table. He watched it out of the corner of his eye, at-
tempting unsuccessfully to perform sex with Rhon-
da. He was unable to achieve an erection. Corll, like-
wise, was frustrated by the force young Kerley put
into wiggling his body.

Wayne got up and said he was going to the *
bathroom. When he came back he picked up the
gun. .Dean stood up and started after him. At that
instant Wayne fired— emptying the revolver's six
bullets, each one finding a mark in CorlPs head, 1
shoulders and back.

What motivated Wayne's fury is less important
than the fact that in shooting Corll he undoubtedly
saved two lives besides his own. Said psychiatrist
Charles Lamark. "From what we later learned of j
Wayne's own participation in the torture and [
murders of the young boys his inability to achieve
erection was providential. Had he become caught up
in the passions of the moment (as he had in previous
orgy murders) he might conceivably have carried out
his promise to Corll of helping in the murder of the
young people.

"Obviously a wide range of emotions flashed
through his mind; his disgust at his own impotence
(for which he may have blamed Dean), his insecurity
in a competitive situation with the mysterious Guy
and, undoubtedly, a compelling desire to assert his
masculinity. In emptying the revolver JWayne was

subconsciously wiping out all the degradation in his
association with Dean Corll."

The^events of the next hours appeared to confirm
Dr. Lamark's analysis. Henley freed the two cap-
tives who, by this time, were hysterical. He may
have considered fleeing Lamar Drive but, if he
thought about it, he couldn't. Everyone Wayne
knew was aware of his association with Corll, Tim
and Rhonda could not be depended upon for silence.
All they knew of Corll was the terror of the experi-
ence, they had barely lived through. So once they
were dressed and somewhat calmed down Wayne
called the police. The three young people filed into
the street where they huddled together waiting for
the police car which soon sped down Lamar Drive
toward the green and wjiite bungalow.

The patrolmen manning it were joined almost im-
mediately by Detective Sergeant David Mullican,
driving an unmarked car. Mullican was a veteran in-
vestigator, calm, collected, sure of himself* an officer
with twelve years of solid police work behind him.
Mullican was no stranger to violence or to Houston's
sorry reputation in the , Fifties and Sixties as the
"murder capital of the world.'*

A patrolman handed Mullican the gun, retrieved
from the porch where Henley dropped hV To calm
the youthful trio Mullican decided to settle for the
barest details of the incident and sent them to the
Pasadena police station to be held for questioning
when he got there. Mullican strode into the house
and began a slow, systematic search as a police am-
bulance arrived to take the body away and a pho-
tographer joined in Mullican *s careful, detail by de-
tail note-taking. He photographed the. body, the

areas of the house where the struggle had taken
place and the various items Mullican pointed out,

Mullican quickly understood that he had wan-
dered into a yastly more complex homicide than the
average. Take the items on his inventory, for in-
stance. They were hardly the things one found in the
average American household* Mullican listed them
— a plyboard torture board with attached handcuffs/
a plastic sheet which covered the rug. Why? Then
there were several sets of handcuffs, an assortment
of handcuff keys, the targe knife Coril had threat-
ened the kids with, a roll of binding tape, a dildo
seventeen inches long, a tube of petroleum jelly and
a mask with a transparent plastic front which fitted
over the face.

What, at first glance, appeared to contain only the
elements of a shooting involving sexual assault, as-
sumed new dimensions. Mullican had been around.
He knew that the items belonged to, in police par-
lance, a person or persons involved in the sexual
practices of sadism and masochism.

The items, collected in CorlFs house^ from the pe-
troleum jelly to the mask, could have been found in
any of the hundreds of "sex boutiques" flourishing
in major American cities and in the mail order cata-
logues of firms dealing in esoteric merchandise.

The sexual revolution has come full circle. And as
a more enlightened generation has found it compar-
atively simple to rethink its attitudes toward free
love, lesbian and male homosexual relations it has
encouraged fetishists to be less furtive about their
sexual mores. Not that devotees of S & M list their
sexual preference on employment applications but
society has come to recognize that the impulse to en-

gage in sado-masochistic practices is more basic to
the human mentality than " most nonparticipants
would like to admit. In light of the suddenness — and
the completeness — with which the sexual revolution
has circled the globe it is difficult to determine
whether the upsurge in S & M is a reflection of a
new vogue or whether it had simply kept itself un-
derground for centuries. Whatever, it is intrinsic to
today's society and among the first to recognize it
were the merchandisers of sexual artifacts.

Virtually all of the sexual paraphernalia available
today in the United States has long been on sale
under the counter in Europe and openly in Eastern
countries like Japan. At hand is an expensive, hand-
somely" turned out catalogue from a New York dealer
in sex gadgets who calls it a "compendium of
amorous and prurient paraphernalia, erotica; et. al."
An entire section is devoted to Bondage and Re-
straint, dramatically introduced with the following:

Man is ingenious. As he has developed other items
to make his life easier to cope with, he has gotten
more sophisticated in his sexual attitudes. He has
come up with a tremendous variety of shackles and
bondage equipment, a complete list of which is ab-
solutely impossible; everyone has his own fantasy,
and for each fantasy there are dozens of pieces of
equipment and dozens of combinations that can be
conceived. We show here a large, variety of items for
bondage, discipline, etc. We are also equipped to
design and manufacture items specifically to suit
your needs.

Among the items available are chain shackles,

strait jackets, hand cuffs, thumb cuffs, slave collars,
body harnesses for men and women, male and te^
male chastity belts, leather thongs, whips and pad^
dies as well as the type of leather mask found m
Dean CorH's house. In promoting the masks the cat-
alogue notes: The sensuous security of a close fitting
hood is without parallel The various styles available
provide for a wide range of bondage tastes.

The torture board, however, appears to have been
CorH's own invention. It was 6 feet long, 2Y* feet
wide made of light brown plyboard. Holes were
drilled in each corner and through the openings a
cord was pushed to tightly hold the arms and legs ot
■ its boy victims who were tied to it, his legs spread-
eagled. ^ '
Another hole was drilled in the middle at the top
of the plywood so it could be hung from the ceiling.
That way, two boys could be tied at the same time
to either side.

After completing his painstaking inspection of the
Corll house, Mullican returned to the police station
where Henley and his companions had been fed;
Kerley and Rhonda were turned over to juvenile
authorities. Mullican began his quiet interrogation
of Wayne Henley.

The question of Henley's right to remain mute or
to have a lawyer present at the time of his confession
to Mullican was to arise when the case came to
court. At the time, reporters, noting how freely Hen-
ley spoke to them, were convinced that the gradual
unfolding of the whole shocking story was Henley s.
free choice. It was, as they pointed out in their

stories, a purgative for the young man's tormented

Satisfied that Wayne had killed his friend in self
defense, Mullican concentrated his questioning on
statements by all three victims of CorH's attack that
the victim had spoken of murdering before. At first
Wayne limited his response to saying that all he
knew of CorH's murders was what Dean had told
him. He believed that there were some murders
committed long before he met Dean and that Corll
had shipped the bodies to California.

Mullican was patient. He knew that, having got-
ten off the subject of his first story, the death of
Dean, Wayne had more to tell. He waited— and not
for long. Wayne told him that he remembered Dean
telling him about two boys, Charles Cobble and
Marty Jones whom he had killed and buried m a
hoathouse he rented in Southeast Houston. Mulli-
can checked with Missing Persons and discovered
that; indeed, the two boys had disappeared under
strange circumstances. They were sharing a fur-
nished room at the time, odd for kids still m high
school and with families they could live with. But,
otherwise, their records were clean.

It wasn't something that Mullican wanted to be-
lieve but his cop's sixth sense told him that Henley
was right; the youths were buried in the boat yard.
The skepticism Mullican met from others in the pre-
cinct when he emerged from the long hours with
Henley didn't stop him. He got a group of trustees
from the jail and made up a search party that would
take off for the Southwest Boat Storage immediate^
ly.

Dean's stall was number eleven and its six-feet

wide doors were locked with a heavy padlock. Police
went in search of the owner, Mrs> Mayme E. Meyn-
ier. She didn't have a key; she said Corll kept the
keys to the place himself. Police forced the doors
open and tried to make sense of the windowless .
crowded stall, about 12 feet wide and 30 feet deep
with a sloping roof running from 14 feet in front to
12 in the rear. It was decided to clear the interior
first of ,the accumulation which included several
bags of lime, a number of empty lime bags, the rust-
ed body of a car and a bicycle later identified as
belonging to two of Corn's victims.

Muliican had selected a section of the dirt floor as -
the place to begin because it showed a suspicious '
bulge. Sweat poured off the bodies of the men as ;
they shovelled away in the oven-like enclosure, step- ]
ping outside now and then to take a breath of the !
hot, humid air. It made very little difference, so
back they went until they reached their first speci-
men of lime. Then they held back on their shovels
and the police fell to their knees to pick away at the j
earth more slowly, sifting the mixture of dirt and j
lime by hand.

Suddenly it was there in all its horror and terrible
stench— the decomposed remains of a young boy
with a rope around his neck. The men shuddered
but the smell was too horrible to pause long. They f
lifted the plastic bag with its pitiful remains out of |
its grave and carried it outside where they laid it |
gently on the ground. |

That was the beginning— but only the beginning, |
The horror had just started.

It was dusk when they brought out the second
body and by this time the Medical Examiner had |

arrived, along with a hearse and lights arid a genera-
tor. The illumination made the heat and the stench
even more unbearable, but the police and the trust-
ees continued to dig, furiously smoking away at
cigars to reduce the acrid smell. When the digging
ended about midnight, eight young bodies had been
found.

Two corpses were found buried together. Prelimi-
nary identification suggested they were brothers. In
some places the bodies went three deep, with a layer
of lime covering each corpse and a layer of lime over
that. Some of the bodies were nude. Others were
buried in bathing suits. One naked body bore only a
cross and a chain around his neck.

As body after body was gouged out of the ground
the stench grew awful and the diggers more morose
and depressed. "It takes a cruel man to do this/'
said Miguel Garaza, one of the Spanish -speaking
trustees. 'T never forget this. It hurts when you
reach in and grab a pair of pants that were for a
small boy."

Throughout the day Houston's television stations
were hot on the trail of the story. Their mobile cars
had located the police activity and they were at the
boathouse as the bodies one by one were carried out-
side and into the waiting hearse. At the height of the
evening news broadcast, a TV news man arranged a
telephone hookup for Wayne Henley to his mother.
His words were heard across the country.

"Mama! Mama! I've killed Dean. I've told them
everything."

"What do you mean, everything?" asked Mrs.
Mary Henley.
"Just everything."

"Ob, Wayne," she said, and she knew what a
mother knows about her son,

"Mama, be happy for me, because now, at last, I
can live."

There were other conversations made public that ;
night. Marina owner Mrs. Meynier recalled that
Dean Corll was a gentleman "with an outgoing na-
ture who smiled a lot and had dimples, a man who
paid his rent promptly." Her daughter volunteered
that Corlf always stopped by and visited her mother
and that sometimes she wondered why he kept un-
loading things at the boathouse so often. Once Corll
asked if he could rent additional space but none was ■
available.

From a father whose son later turned out to be
among the victims a reporter heard, "Months ago I ;
told the police 1 suspected bodies were being buried
by that man in the boat shed. They did nothing
about it."

At midnight police called a halt to the grueling,
sickening task. They could endure it no longer-
even if they knew there were still more bodies buried ;
there. Henley had enumerated seventeen. But the
horror, the stench, the grueling work in the humidity
affected even the toughest human spirit. They ■
packed up the lights, the generator, the shovels, the
picks, loaded themselves and the trustees into cars, \
and got out. Only the car carrying Henley and the
detectives had the siren on.

They wouid start again at dawn.

For the Medical Examiner of Harris County, Dr.
Joseph Jachimczyk and his staff the cruel task of
identifying the young victims began . -.They were too
overcome by the enormity amd difficulties of their

task to suspect they were piecing together the medi-
cal evidence of the largest mass murder in America's
modern history.

Nothing in the criminal annals of Houston or its
suburban neighbor, Pasadena, had ever occurred to
create the tensions and confusions existing there on
the morning of August ninth, a Thursday. The mag-
nitude of the tragedy had just begun to penetrate
the minds of the numbed, bone-weary city officials
and police. At a time when they needed most to
collect themselves they were hit from every direc-
tion.

Wayne Henley's anguished telephone conversation
with his mother had been heard on TV around the
world. The expectation that there would be more-
many more — corpses than those the boathouse was
physically capable of concealing had produced an
avalanche of queries from the global press. Ameri-
ca's major newspapers assigned top reporters to the
case, and Houston's hotels began handling overseas
reservations for European publications whose corre-
spondents and photographers were already winging
over the Atlantic.

Official Houston's telephones bogged down under
the weight of calls from all over the country from
anxious parents who were fearful that their runaway
sons had been among the bodies uncovered the night
before. The Medical Examiner's office was inundat-
ed with inquiries—and even threats. Operators did
their best to explain the problems involved in iden-
tifying th© corpses and the 1 reluctance of the Ex-
aminer to release names prematurely. Their man-

power was already taxed to the breaking point.
Some of the remains consisted only of bones and
hair. Lime deposits sprinkled over the bodies had
hastened their decomposition.

Closer to home, Mrs. Henley arrived at the Pa-
sadena police station to be near her son. She told re-
porters, "Dean must have done something terrible
for him to do such a thing." She wished the police
would hang him to a tree rather than keep him
cooped up in prison. She described her son as a good
boy who had dropped out of school in order to help
support her and his grandmother, Mrs. M. Christine
Weed. She remembered Dean Corll as a man so nice
and easy going that even her pet dog liked him. Mrs.
Henley said Corll "just counted himself as one of the
kids," and the only time she ever saw tiim angry was
when she made reference to his age.

From Colorado Dean Corll's mother, Mrs, Mary
West, was heard from. She bridled at the broadcast
insinuations that her son was a homosexual, recall-
ing that, as a youth, a* man had made improper ad-
vances to him which be had aggressively resisted.
She volunteered the opinion that his juvenile friends
were, more logically, the criminals and that they
were using her dead son to cover their tracks.

The parents of missing boys in and around Hous-
ton, Pasadena and especially the Heights, were the
most heartbreaking to deal with. What could the
authorities say? Little beyond the obvious, that
identification was proceeding slowly but surely.
They wanted, at all costs, to avoid double heart-
break by identifying a body mistakenly. Even at
that they failed, sending the wrong bodies to a dis-
traught father. They stoically endured the anger

heaped on them by soul-sick, mind weary fathers
and mothers who accused them of inefficiency and
slovenly police work. If there were excuses to offer,
now was not the time to make them.

Only the detectives immediately involved in the
case could hope that their investigation was on the
threshold of becoming more specific if no more toler-
able than it had been the day before.

Early in the Mullican questioning of Wayne Hen-
ley, the name of David Brooks had shown up. He
was identified as the boy who first introduced Hen-
ley and Corll. Enough was said to establish a homo-
sexual relationship among the three men. When
Brooks was located, his father Alton Brooks accom-
panied him to the police station.

Tragedy shows little discrimination when it
strikes and Alton Brooks must have wondered at the
fates that led him to a police station where he deliv-
ered his son to answer questions about the Corll tor-
ture killings. Brooks and his father had talked long
into the night and over and over again the young
man assured his parent that he personally had never
taken another's life. After young Brooks made the
confession, Brooks, Sr. stepped out of the limelight
and was not heard from afterward. The confession
follows:

My name is David Brooks. I am 18 years old
and I live at 145 Pech with my wife Bridget.

The first killing that Tremember happened
when Dean was living at the Yorktown town-
house. The first few that Dean killed were sup-
posed to have been sent off someplace in Cali-
fornia.

I never actually killed anyone but I was in
the room when they happened and was sup-
. posed to help if something went wrong. The
first was Yorktown and there were two boys
there and 1 left before they were killed but
Dean told me that he had killed them after-
wards. I don't know who they were or where
they were buried.

The first I remember was at 6363 San Felipe.
It was Reuben Harvey and only Dean and t I
also remember two boys who were killed at the
Place One Apts. on Magnum. They were
brothers whose father worked next door where
they were building some apartments. I was
present when Dean killed those boys by stran-
gling them. But again I didn't heip. The youn-
gest of these boys is the youngest of them all.

On Columbia just before Wayne came into
the picture Dean kept this boy around the
house for about four days before he killed him.
I don't remember his name but we picked him
up on Eleventh and Rutland. I think I helped
bury this boy also but I don't remember where
it was. That was about two years ago. It really
upset Dean to have to kill this boy because he
really liked him.

Glass was also killed at Columbia. I had
taken him home one time but he wouldn't get
out because he wanted to go back to Dean. I
took him back and Dean ended up killing him.
Now that I think about it I'm not sure it was
Glass but I believe it was.
]- When we were living on Columbia Wayne
got involved. Wayne took part in getting the

boys at first and then later took an active part
in the killings. Wayne seemed to enjoy causing
pain and was especially sadistic at the Schuler
address.

Most of the killings after Wayne got involved
had all three of us but I still did not take part
in the actual killings. Mark Scott was killed at
the Schuler address. I had told yesterday in my
witness statement about Mark Scott being at
the Schuler bouse. But I did not say that I was
present which I was. Mark had a knife and he
tried to get Dean. He swung at him with a
knife and caught Dean's shirt and barely broke
the skin. He still had one hand tied and Dean
grabbed the hand and Wayne ran out of the
room and got a pistol and Mark just gave up.
Wayne killed Mark Scott and I think that he
strangled him. Mark was either buried at the
beach or at the boathouse.

There was a Billy Balsch and one named
Johnny, I think. Malone. Wayne strangled
Billy and he said/ "Hey Johnny" and when
Johnny looked Up Wayne shot him in the fore-
head with a ,25 automatic. The bullet came
out of his ear and he raised upland about three
minutes later he said, "Wayne, please don't."
Then Wayne strangled him and Dean helped.

It was when we were living on Schuler that
Wayne and Dean got me down and started to
kill me. I begged Dean not to kill me and he fi-
nally let me go. Also here he got Billy Ridinger.
I took care of him while I was there and I be-
lieve the only reason he is alive is because 1
begged them not to kill htm.

Wayne and Dean got one boy by themselves
at Schuler, a tall skinny boy. I just happened
to walk in and there he was. I left before they

killed him. " -

The first at Wescott Towers Apartment
(They had two there), I think were two young
boys from the Heights. I don't know their
name Wayne accidentally shot one of them
around 7 p.m. I was asleep in the other room.
Dean told me Wayne had come in waving the
22 and accidentally shot one of the boys m the
jaw. The bullet just went in a little bit. They
killed those boys later that day.

Dean moved to the Princess Apts. on Wirt
Road and I remember him getting one boy
there by himself. He wanted me to help him
but I wouldn't do it. I didn't want to mess with
this one because I had someplace I wanted to
go so I tried to get him mad so he would leave
but he wanted to stay. Dean grabbed this boy
and within three minutes of when he grabbed
him I was gone. At that time I was using
Dean's car so I was in and out all the time.

When he moved to Pasadena there was one
of them from Baton Rouge and one small blond
boy from South Houston. I saw the boy from
South Houston about 45 minutes. I took him a
pizza and then I left and he wanted me to come
back. I wasn't there when either of these boys
were killed. I did come in just after Dean had
killed the boy from Baton Rouge and that was
on a different day from the blond boy.

In all I guess there were between 25 and 30
boys killed and they were buried in three dif-

ferent places. -

I was present and helped bury many of them
but not all of them. Most are buried at the
boat stall, three or four at Sam Rayburn— I am
sure at Sam Rayburn, On the first one at Sam
Rayburn I helped bury them and then the next
one we took to Sam Rayburn, When he got
there Dean and Wayne found that the first one
had come to the surface and either a foot or a
hand was above the ground. When they buried
this one the second time they put some type of
sheet rock on top of him to keep him down,
' The third place was at the beach at High
Island. This was right off the Winnie exit
where that road goes to the beach. You turn
east on the beach road and go till the pave-
ment .changes, which is about a quarter or half
mile, and the bodies are on the right side of the
highway, about 15 or 20 yards off the road. I
never actually buried any here but I always
drove the car. I know that one of the graves
had a big rock on top of it. I think there were
five 'or. more bodies buried at this location.

The bodies at the beach are in a row down
"the beach for perhaps a half a mile or so.

I am willing to show the officers where- the
graves are and will try to locate as many as
f possible.

I regret all this that happened and am sorry
for the kids' families. I am making this state-
ment of my own free will and have not prom-
ised anything.

The statement was signed by David Brooks and

witnessed by his father and Homicide Detective Mm
D. Tucker.

With the Brooks confession in their pockets, Hous-
ton police -shifted the macabre investigation into
high gear. "The second day's digging in the boathouse
was, if anything, worse than the first. As they dug
deeper for bodies that had been buried longer only
fragments of bones and tendons remained— the flesh
having been eaten away by the lime. They were sim-
ply lumps of decomposed flesh.

They found nine more bodies in that dreadful day
—a day when the digging stopped time and time
again when the men began to slip in the damp
ground. The stench was unbearable and trustees and
police who came outside for air swore to themselves
that nothing could drive them back. They went
back.

Brooks and Henley started a mournful parade as
the boys led an army of police and trustees back to
the-boathouse, then to a beach at High Island. They
were trailed by still another army of news reporters,
photographers, feature writers representing the press
of the world and television newsmen^ There were hel-
icopters hovering overhead and even a small plane.
Then there were the curious— thousands of them
who flocked to the burial sites to watch the grisly ex-
cavations. 1

By Friday the body count stood at twenty-three
after four more bodies were unearthed near the Sam
Rayburn Reservoir. Another two were dug up at
High Island.

The 22nd and 23rd bodies were found on a stretch
of lonely beach near the east end of the Bolivar Pen-
insula. The boys wanted it known that they had not

buried one of the High Island bodies. Brooks said
Dean Corli had one day six months earlier pointed
out a big rock on the beach and said, "This is where
I buried one of the boys." The body was almost to-
tally decomposed except for some ftesh on the feet.
It was wrapped in plastic sheeting similar to that
covering many of those found at the Southwest Boat
Storage.

About a hundred yards up the beach the sand
yielded still another victim— this one was
unwrapped. The skull had long black hair.

Reporters noticed the contrast in the behavior of
the two young killers. Brooks refused to speak with
reporters and futilely tried to shield his face from
the cameras. Henley, on the other hand, appeared
relatively unperturbed, answering questions freely
and even inviting the photographers to "come over
and get your pictures."

At one point when newsman asked Wayne who
was in the graves he blandly replied, u Just some
boys I helped Dean get. He raped them, killed them
and buried them. I helped him." How did Corll kill
them? Henley explained that Corll would place his
victims on a plastic sheet, either shoot them or
choke them, then roll up the plastic. Asked why
Corll buried some of the boys so far away, Henley
answered and then laughed at his sick joke, "Be-
cause he ran out of room at the boathouse."

There was little love between the two boys. Asked
if his confession had incriminated Brooks, Wayne
answered, "No, David hung himself/' Then he vo-
lunteered, "David Brooks lived off Wayne most of
his life. But I worked."

Over one of the graves at the Sam Rayburn Reser-

voir, one hundred and twenty miles north of Hous-
ton, Henley bowed his head, pointed at the spot and
said, "Billy is buried there." Billy Lawrence was
only fifteen when he left his home in the Heights
earlier in the summer, telling his parents he was off
to see the world with a rock band. But he made his
way to the Candy Man's torture board instead.

At another spot in the woods the skinny youth was
asked by reporters, "What happened here?" Henley
answered, "Boys were buried. Dean decided he
wanted to have sex with them, killed them then
brought them here."

"Why here, Wayne?"

The boy mumbled, "Dean's parents have a place
here." He told the reporters that Corll paid him and
Brooks five and ten dollars a boy to lure them to his
various apartments. "I feel pretty grotesque," he
said, "I almost cracked several times. I didn't feel I
was able to hold my sanity much longer."

Reporters heard from one of the detectives that
Wayne told him about a boy Corll had strangled.
"He thought he had drowned the fellow in a bathtub
so he stepped outside. The boy got up and put up a
fight. Coril finally strangled him."

Another officer, looking at the ambulances driving
back and forth with their cargo of plastic bags of
bones, said sadly, "We still have more good people
than we have people going around taking lives.
That's my opinion. But I think possibly the law
ought to be changed back to where you get an eye for
an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

At a lake cabin rented by CorlFs father police dis-
covered an array of devices believed connected with
Corll's sex habits — several plastic bags, a rubber de-

vice with loops on its handle, a rope tied into a
noose, three pairs of plastic gloves and a large
canvas sling.

By Monday, August fourteenth, the search party
uncovered four more bodies on a beach east of High
Island near Galveston, bringing the total to twenty-
seven youths in what was now known as the Houston
Mass Murder Case, Later, one of the bodies was
ruled out as unrelated to the Corll case, reducing the
total to twenty-six, still making the orgy of murder
the worst in United States history.

Until the Houston case the most murders attribut-
ed to one person in recent times involved the bodies
of twenty-five farm hands found buried in a Califor-
nia farm along the Feather River in 1961. Juan
Corona, a farm worker, was convicted of the killings
in 1973 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Other mass murders included:

Charles Whitman who killed his wife and mother,
then killed fourteen persons and wounded thirty-two
others on August 1, 1966, from the observation deck
of the University of Texas Tower in Austin before
being shot down from his perch by a policeman.

Howard B, Unruh, twenty-eight, a World War II
veteran, killed thirteen Camden, N. J. residents in
September, 1949, He was captured and is confined
to a State Hospital in Trenton. Richard Speck, a
twenty-five year aid drifter, killed eight young
nurses July 14, 1966, in their apartment on Chica-
go's South Side. Sentenced to death, his life has
been spared by the Supreme Court's decision out-
lawing the death penalty.

However, the mass murderer of the record book
may have been Herbert Webster Mudgett, known as

H. H. Holmes, who confessed in the late 1880's to
disposing of at least one hundred and fifty bodies.
He was found guilty and hanged in 1886 for the
murder of a business associate. When, after his
death, Holmes* house burned down, searchers found
the remains of an estimated two hundred corpses in
the basement.

The Corl3 killings amount to a gruesome new
record in that the victims were all male. Most mass
murderers on this continent directed their insanity
at women. Some believed there was a homosexual
element in the Juan Corona case but the killer's
family vehemently denied it. The classic American
homosexual killing involved one boy, killed by Leo-
pold and Loeb in Chicago earlier this century. They
were defended by famed criminal lawyer, Clarence
Qarrow, who avoided a jury trial and pleaded in-
sanity before a judge. The killers, rich, socially
prominent and both superior intellectually, were
sentenced to life imprisonment instead of the com-
mon murder penalty of the era, the electric chair.

The world record for homosexual mass killings ap-
pears to belong to Germany's Ogre of Hanover, Fritz
Haarmann who lived from 1879 to 1925. Haarmann
was found guilty of twenty-four murders involving
sex perversion. There might have been thirty —
Haarmann wasn't sure.

The height of his murderous career occurred dur-
ing the black market and inflation that struck Ger-
many after World War I. Haarmann, a police in-
former, used to pose as a detective and would use his
authority as a "detective" to lure victims to his
apartment.

Dr. Shervert Frazier, an authority on violent

murders, wrote, "By killing children and young men
he was able to combine sexual perversion with finan-
cial profit from the sale of their clothes and (it was
believed) from their flesh in the form of black mar-
ket sausages."

Haarmann was aided by a younger homosexual
partner. Before his death Haarmann requested that
his feUow murderer lay a wreath on his grave on his
birthday.

From the minute its personnel was summoned to
the boathouse, Houston's Medical Examiner's office
became a laboratory under siege. Normal operations
of the bureau were tripled, quadrupled; posts had to
be manned virtually around the clock.

Not a member of the team ever thought of shirk-
ing on the job and the Examiner's telephone opera-
tors deserved medals for their incredibly difficult Job
of handling the hysterical calls from distraught
parents. It was neither easy or feasible to explain the
complicated process of identifying decomposed
corpses buried in lime and retrieved from the earth
after years, They did their best— commiserating on a
personal level and telling callers over and over that
"they understood" and "everything humanly possi-
ble is being done."

Three days after the first eight bodies were un-
covered at the boatshed, only three had been posi-
tively identified. Compounding the problems of
identification was the absence of dental charts and
fingerprints. First, fingerprints become unrecogniza-
ble after long periods in the ground. Second, no
prints had ever been taken of the young victims.

Third, some had never been to a dentist, Everett
Waldrop was able to identify his sons from their
clothes— a shirt and a belt buckle. One boy's habit
of routinely tearing off one pocket of his shirt helped
facilitate the identification.

Ten bodies were handled over one twenty-four
hour period, leaving eleven untouched. Dr. Jachimc-
zyk explained that the usual work load of his labora-
tory continued and could not be neglected. "As soon
as we get a break," he said, "we'll go back to them."

"Ideally, what we would like to do is to keep going
right on through but it will take all of next week and
possibly the week after that." The Medical Ex^
aminer throughout maintained his optimism that all
the bodies would be identified in spite of the obstac-
les. He asked parents of missing boys to aid him by
supplying dental charts where they existed.

For the doctor it was a tedious, heartbreaking job,
the worst he had ever encountered in years of service
as a medical examiner. What appeared to bother
him most was the pressure of the work. Tension af-
fected his normally cheerful disposition.

Out of the Medical Examiner's office the names
started to emerge— one by one. As they reached the
black ink in the official reports of the city and the
newspaper stories they became statistics, so many
aged seventeen, so many from out-of-town, so many
from Houston, etc.

At least five of the victims came from the Heights-
Two disappeared in the fortnight directly preceding
Corirs murder. Two others had been missing more
than two years.

They ranged in age from David Hilligiest and
Richard C. Hembree who were thirteen to Ruben

Watson who was nineteen. Frank Aguirre was also
nineteen until he met his murderers, their torture
board, and the plastic covering in which he was
strangled to death.

How could it have happened? How could so many
boys whose paths crossed every day, on the street, at
the neighborhood candy stores, in school at the mu-
nicipal swimming pool, disappear off the face of the
earth without a single, solitary person noticing the
coincidence?

Why, in view of the vaunted genius of modern
computers, were not their names and those of their
buddies given a runthrough to determine if some
pattern were involved in their disappearance? Fail-
ing that, why hadn't a human noticed the link be-
tween, the missing boys and Corll-Henley^Brooks?
They were all visible, well known in the Heights.

Struggling to sustain herself with some sort of ra-
tionale, Mrs. Dorothy Hilligiest said, "I think the
police did something. But they could have done
more. I knew my boy wasn't a runaway. But they
class the very young and adults as missing persons.
Teenagers are listed as runaways."

That's part of the answer. But complicating the
Houston case was the fact that the disappearances
occurred over a two year span. And while children in
a neighborhood usually get to know each other, quite
often the families do not.

During one of the few breaks in those First two
weeks of the search Captain R. L. Horton, head of
the Missing Persons Detail shook his head sadly and
said, "About 99.9 percent of the runaways today
turn out to be alive and well and happy wherever
they want tp be. But those other few— they're the
ones who turn up in shallow graves."

PART TWO

Runaways

"Had Dean Corll ever been reached by gay libera-
tion, there might be thirty more boys in their homes
or on the streets of Houston, Texas" Sociologist
Laud Humphreys.

When Fred and Dorothy Hilligiest told police on
May 30, 1971, that their son was missing they were
assured that he was probably staying with friends.

They couldn't accept that. "That wasn't David's
way or his nature/' the mother said. "I couldn't get
over that they didn't get out and look for him. After
all, he was a human being, a child."

When they finally convinced themselves that
David had disappeared the Hilligiests spent one
thousand dollars for a private detective agency to in-
vestigate. The agency came up with a few clues but
nothing substantial. They couldn't very well for
David had long since been killed. They also adver-
tised in underground newspapers and offered re-
wards. The distraught parents even consulted medi-
ums and clairvoyants.

"You fear for the worst and hope for the best,"

Dorothy Hilligiest said. When David disappeared he
was believed to have gone swimming with Gregory
Winkle, the sixteen year old son of Selma Winkle, a
widow, who lived a block away from the Hilligiests,
two blocks from the Henley house.

She once worked in a candy factory and remem-
bered when Dean Corll was the foreman there. "A
likable person," she said, a "gentleman." When
Wayne Henley was a small boy he was often brought
to the Winkle home by his grandmother, to play . :
with the other boys.

"It showed that the family cared who he played
with," said Mrs. Winkle. "They cared how he grew
up. But something along the line went wrong."

It is difficult to measure bitterness. Some of the
Heights parents bravely concealed it; others turned
their sorrow into fury. Everett Waldrop, for in-
stance, a construction worker, quit the city and
moved to Atlanta after giving up hope in the disap-
pearance of his two sons, Donald, fifteen and Jerry,
thirteen. Their brutally assaulted bodies, badly de-
composed, were among the first dug up from the %
lime pits of the boatshed. Waldrop recognized a belt !.
buckle and shirt as belonging to his youngsters.

The Waldrop brothers dropped out of sight in Jan-
uary, 1971, when they said they were going to visit a
friend only six blocks away from their home.

Said Waldrop, "I went to the police the next |
morning. I camped on that police department door
for eight months. I was there as much as the chief
was.

"But all they did was say, 'Why are you down
here? You know your boys are runaways.' They
treated me like I was some sort of idiot."

The captain in charge could not recall ever having
talked to Waldrop.

When Houston's television began to crowd the
screen with running accounts of the search for graves
and corpses, Mrs. Walter Scott could stand it no
longer. She turned off the set and refused to answer
the telephone. "We feared the worst, so what was
the use?" she said, her voice trailing away to noth-
ing.

Her son, Mark, eighteen, had left home for a
weekend trip to Mexico after being arrested for car-
rying a prohibited knife. He sent his parents a post-
card from Austin. "How are you doing?" it read. "I
am in Austin for a couple of days. I found a good
job. I am making $3.00 an hour. Til be home when I
get enough money to pay my lawyer."

Like so many of the parents, Mrs. Scott remem-
bered both Henley and Brooks. "Wayne came over
for a junior high school party. He was quite talk-
ative. He was the first to arrive and the last to
leave."

Brooks, she recalled, had once stayed overnight
with Mark. During that visit Brooks evidently shot
Mark with a BB gun.

In his confession Brooks told how the youth stood
up to Corll and tried to get him with a knife. He
ended up being strangled but his body was never
identified.

There was a quarrel in the Cobble home in the
later part of July, 1973. Charles, seventeen, the son
of Mr. and Mrs, T. G, Cobble, left home to share a
furnished room with a friend, Marty Ray Jones, also
seventeen. At first the Cobbles were not particularly
concerned because they knew where he was and were

acquainted with young Jones' parents. On July 26
the sons called both parents, saying they were in
trouble and needed a thousand dollars. Jones told
the police he feared the boys were involved with nar-
cotics pushers. Neither was ever seen again. Their
strangled bodies were found in the boatshed.

Mrs. Joe R. Aguirre said her son, Frank, nineteen,
disappeared in March, 1972, never returning after he
left for work at a nearby restaurant. She said at the
time of Frank's disappearance he had been dating
Rhonda Williams, the girl at the Corll house on the
night of the murder.

When the body of Billy Lawrence was found at
Lake Rayburn his father, Horace J. Lawrence, re^
called his doubts and suspicions of Wayne Henley.
He remembered that Wayne had called his boy sev-
eral times and had been at the house. Then there
was a robbery. "Whoever did it," said the senior
Lawrence, "knew the layout. They got the stereo 1
had given my son for his birthday. They got cameras
and- film."

Lawrence heard about his son's body being discov-
ered when a friend called to say that he had read it
in the newspapers. The authorities had not bothered
to contact him personally. Said Lawrence, "If some
of these kids would realize what was going on in that
jungle they would wake up and face the facts of life
and face reality."

Mr. and Mrs. Billy Baulch waited anxiously for
words that their sons' bodies had been identified.
When it came there was relief. At long last the terror
was over. They could cry now, spill over their emo-
tions, For so long they had sought to sustain their
hopes that their boys were alive.

Their boys, Billy Gene, Jr. eighteen, and Michael
Anthony, sixteen, were acquainted with Dean Corll.

They had gone to school with David Brooks and
Wayne Henley.

They lived in the Heights.

And they were both runaways.

Michael was the veteran runaway, having left
home about three times, Billy sold candy door-to^
door in the Heights neighborhood for Corll.

Billy Gene disappeared first in May, 1972. One of
the people his parents contacted to keep an eye out
for him was Dean Corll. They also asked Wayne
Henley to be alert for any information or clues that
might lead to the discovery of their boy's where-
abouts. Both Corll and Henley appeared to share the
Bauleh's grief and promised to do whatever they
could.

Then six months later, just when they had re-
signed themselves to the inevitable, Michael disap-
peared. They found his body in the boatshed, shot
twice in the head.

In death the body of Dean Corll was given a re-
spect he accorded none of his more than two score
victims. A Methodist minister said at the graveside
service of his flag-draped coffin was lowered into the
ground, "We must now deliver this man into God's
judgement and also his mercy and grace."

A naturalized Frenchman, visiting the cemetery
at the time, shook his head in bewilderment. He
could understand the funeral, yes, but not the flag.
Corll had served a year in the Air Force and was
thus entitled to military ceremonies.

Then there was a letter in the newspapers from
Dean Corirs mother addressed to the accused boys.

It read in part: "My heart is heavy with sorrow not
only for the loss of my son, but also for the loss of all
the boys and people whose lives they touched."

"To David and Wayne, you may have the best
defense lawyers the world can offer but your best
defense Is God. You can lie, plan and plant evidence
and shift the blame to one who can not defend him-
self, but you surely know that your days are num-
bered, whether it is behind bars or walking the
street. We are not concerned with your bodies, but
we are concerned with your souls. 'And the truth will
set you free/

"If you know where to find the bodies of these
children you also have the list of names. Please set
the anxious parents* hearts at ease and see how
much better you feel."

Eventually some response had to be made to the
charges that the Houston police were indifferent to
parents reporting missing children and to the ac-
cusation that no investigator had sought to uncover
a pattern to the juvenile disappearances.

Police Chief Herman Short summoned the press
and took off, slapping down both parents and the
media. He said that his department had done every-
thing it could— and more than was legally required
—in tracking down the missing juveniles.

Short blames lax parental guidance, inadequate
laws and the news media for the criticism of his
department. Referring to the Heights, Short said,
"The area that most of these persons came from is
not one of the highest crime incident areas at all. We
could have no way of seeing in a period of time of

three years or more anything to indicate a pattern,"
Short pointed out that under Texas law running
away is not a crime and, "We don't have responsi-
bility by law nor the authority to make criminal
cases out of runaways. We do everything we can in
this particular type of situation. What we have here
is simply a public service.

"Unfortunately, many times parents will not even
tell us the truth about these things. They know why
the runaways have left but they won't tell us this in-
formation. "

Short, taking shots at parents, said, "We do know
that some of the parents are not exactly discharging
their own responsibility as far as runaways are con-
cerned and as far as raising and disciplining their
children."

To charges that not enough effort or police man-
power were used to trace the runaways, Short an-
swered, "There will never be enough staff to check
out constantly and consistently each and every one
of these cases. That doesn't mean that each case
doesn't get an investigation."

Another defender of the Houston Police Depart-
ment was Captain R. K. Horton who pointed out
that a city the size of Houston handles five thousand
missing juvenile reports annually, and most of these
are automatically solved when the runaway returns
voluntarily or after the parents hear from him. In
the cases involving victims of the Houston Mass
Murder each disappearance, he admitted, was
touched with a note of mystery. Two boys never re-
turned from a municipal swimming pool; one didn't
come back from his job at a restaurant; another two
were last seen getting a lift in a light-colored van

and one walked oat on his home after an argument
with his parents. But there was no substantive rea-
sons to suspect foul play."

Said Horton, "Ail parents of children who have
been gone longer than twenty-four hours will tell you
that their boys were victims of violence. The real
reasons are varied— sometimes arguments inside the
family.

"It is extremely difficult for some young people to
adjust to today's society. What are they led to be-
lieve? Leading a decent, honorable lawful life can
seem dull compared to the 'exciting' life of those
violating the law."

Hortpn explained the procedure in his bureau. Ini-
tial investigations are aimed at determining whether
the missing person ran away or was possibly abduct-
ed. The decision is left up to the individual police of-
ficer. "It depends on intuition," he said; "After a
while you come up with a typical picture of a disap-
pearance where violence could have been involved,"

Illustrating the legal vacuum in which police
operate Horton cited the new family code adopted
by the Texas legislation and intended as an answer
to the national problem of runaways. One section
defined a missing child as:

"The voluntary absence of a child without the
consent of his parents for a substantial length of
time or without the intent to return. "

Asked Horton, "What is a substantial length of
time? What if we find a child who says he plans to
return home, say, at Christmas? Does that consti-
tute an intent to return?"

The Houston murders precipitated widespread na-
tional interest in the problem of runaway youth.

Newspaper surveys revealed that one million young
people ran away from their homes last year. Police
records showed that locating them was enormously
difficult but there existed a compensating factor in
that many voluntarily returned to their home-
But those who don't come back are impossible to
find. They wander into Greenwich Village and
quickly become lost in the subculture of New York.
They drift to the French Quarter of New Orleans or
to the Rocky Mountains and the beaches of Califor-
nia or Florida.

The procedure for handling missing juveniles
varies from city to city but, in essence, it amounts to
filing a report, alerting street patrolmen and, if a
picture is available, giving it circulation. It is at this
point that police activity ends.

A spokesman for the Denver Police Department
explained that literally thousands of juveniles drift-
ed into the mountain city annually and it was easy
to get lost in it. He wondered why America was so
reluctant to adopt the European idea of requiring
each citizen to carry an identity card — from the cra-
dle to the grave. Hotels, rooming houses, pensions,
apartments are ail obliged by law to supply the
nearest police station with the names — and the
cards — of guests staying overnight. While not one
hundred percent effective the system does achieve a
comprehensive check on the population of countries
maintaining the identity card requirement.

New York City has been facing the runaway prob-
lem for decades, long before it became an "in"
thing. New York has the reputation of being the big-
gest, the most glittering, the most exciting of the
country's big cities. Naturally the runaway seeks it

out. Its problems are substantially the same as those {
of other cities, but of greater magnitude. i!

■""It is easier to find a needle in a haystack," said I 1
Patrolman Stephen Donnelly, one of six members of ■?
Young Aid Division's special anti-runaway squad.

"Even if you have a picture of a kid and a good t
idea of where he's staying, it's still very difficult.
The picture is probably a few years old and the kid
now looks disheveled and completely different.'.' ( \

The special unit concentrates on patrolling areas \
of New York where runaways most commonly gravi-
tate to — the East and West Village, Times Square,
Coney Island, Central Park and the Port Authority j
Bus Terminal.

"You develop a good idea of what a runaway looks
like, a profile," said Donnelly who was involved in j -
the creation of the special unit in 1972. "Instead of
looking for a particular kid we look for a type. AJrid
who is panhandling is a good 'stop,' a good person to
check out. Also someone who looks disheveled, a lit-
tle dirty. Somebody who doesn't know where he's j.
going at three in the morning may be a runaway, i
Another tip is an out-of-state accent." y

The typical runaway who comes to New York is
white, middle-class and 14 to 17 years old. They are
attracted to the city by its excitement, late hours
and the presence of large numbers of teenagers like
themselves.

So much for the vital statistics that grew out of
the search for information about runaways following
the Houston massacre. Said Dr. Charles Lamark,
"Runaway youth are a social phenomenon that has
always existed. In the depression, for instance, thou-
sands of young adults just left their home and their .

families didn't hear from them for years. Today the
problems are different, but we still have runaways.
They are the products of our times, today's permis-
sive society and the new independence of young peo-
ple. The revolt against the establishment has signifi-
cantly eroded the family unit.

"Parents rightly, found fault with the Houston
police for doing so little in tracking down the run-
aways from the Heights. The police, with consider-
able validity, maintained the parents failed to exert
sufficient authority over their children."

"But what stands out in the particular case of the
Houston runaways and the character of Dean Corll
is that not one of the many people who knew him
and talked to the press ever voiced doubts about
him. In the thousands of words I read this man
turned out to be 'Mr. Nice Guy^the fellow who was
so fond of children, who drove them around in his
van (equipped with a sofa in the back) and dished
out candy so generously. Only one parent recalled
having worried about her son's friendship with the
Candy Man and told him to stay away from Corll.
Having gone that far, she dismissed the matter from
her mind. There were no nagging doubts, no further
suspicions that she felt should be looked into.

"There was a time when parents not only knew
where their children were but who their friends were,
And that was a less dangerous era than the. unhappy
one in which we find ourselves. I should think that
now, of all times, when there exists so much crime
and danger around us, that parents would be even
more alert than the elders of previous generations. I
would rather be called a meddlesome old fool by my
son for wanting to know his whereabouts and his as-

sociations than find his rotted foody covered with lime
in a shallow grave along the shore of the Gulf of
Mexico.

"Here was Dean Corll, a man the families on the
Heights saw day after day when he worked there as
a delivery man, and who later lived in a variety of
apartments while he was employed as an electrician
for the Houston Lighting and Power Company. As
we will see later in the story of his private life, he
was wholly wrapped up in young people, especially
teen-age boys. He was unmarried and no one found
his excessive preoccupation with male youth suspi-
cious. Either Corll was extremely clever or the peo-
ple of the Heights incredibly naive."

Corll didn't fool the youngsters, however. When
the murders came to light the Heights kids were
asked what they knew about Corll. "Dean was an all
right guy," said a number of them. "But kinda
spooky. He didn't dig chicks. Seemed to hate them.
There's got to be something wrong in that,"

Thirty years ago, in the Thirties, the world was
ravaged by the Great Depression and the United
States, no less than the most underprivileged of the
African or Asian nations, suffered an economic de-
cline that threw millions of able-bodied men and
women out of work, into the breadlines and soup
kitchens set up by private charity organizations.
With the possible exception of New York State and
some minor city and county social programs no ave-
nues of relief existed like the welfare of today. And
of course, unemployment insurance and Social Secu-
rity had not yet been invented.

The worst hit among the population were the
young. It was estimated that the Depression threw
more than two million boys on the road, dropouts
from school, their homes and society, young men
who "bummed" their way from town to town, seek-
ing handouts wherever they could find them, from
housewives, the owners of small business. They per-
formed farm chores for bread and a bowl of soup.
They walked the dusty highways, slept in fields,
shipped in freight cars, thumbed rides from motor-
ists. They were Americans coming from nowhere,
going nowhere.

Eight years later when the children of the Depres-
sion were called to the draft, National Fitness Direc-
tor John B. Kelly (father of Grace Kelly) found that
forty percent of the young men examined were unfit.
Most rejections were for bad teeth. Other defects in
the order of prevalence were poor eyesight, diseases
of the heart and circulation, deformities of arms and
legs and mental disorders. To those were added the
invisible scars inflicted in hobo jungles by thieves,
drug addicts and men like the strapping homosexual
remembered by the distinguished commentator Eric
Sevareid. He had spent some time on the road,
along with the other two million, and told historian
William Manchester that a man had offered him a
quarter for his cooperation in sodomy.

In the White House there sat Herbert Hoover, the
last of the presidents to dress regularly for dinner.
The man who, during World War I, had achieved an
international reputation as a humanitarian for mas-
terminding the food program in Belgium, and who
had saved millions of that tiny country's citizens
from starvation, sat down night after night to a

seven course dinner, maintaining that he thus
served as an example of confidence in the country's
economy.

Hoover remained steadfast in his conviction that
feeding the unemployed and the hungry lay outside
the providence of national government. This in the
face of the enormity of the Depression, the devasta-
tion it spread in every strata of society. It was not
just a poor man's Depression, not another injustice
heaped on minorities. The Depression spilled out of
the ghetto into business, factories, banks, vast cor-
porations, Wall Street, the professions and, of
course, the arts.

Men who had never touched picks and shovels in
their lives battled for city day work — shoveling snow
or cleaning the streets and parks. Few were the
Americans left untouched by the Depression or un-
scarred thereafter. Its effects were visible in the gen-
eration it bred, uncertain people who fear that what-
ever, security they have achieved will overnight be
snatched away. They were cautious, careful liberals
tinged with conservatism. Where once they wel-
comed change, today they fear it.

Their own children are today's parents of the na-
tion's teenagers and much of the previous genera-
tion's fears and doubts have rubbed off on them.
They are bewildered by the overwhelming changes
in today's society but have assumed they are power-
less against them — especially those involving young
people. The revolt of youth has been complete and
total. Their elders realize there can be no turning
back. When they face the generation gap clearly and
without prejudice they have to conclude that today's
youth is vastly more sophisticated, more worldly

than their generation's.

No one, tragically, could have prevented the mass
murderers of Houston from running their macabre
course — no one but the young victims themselves.
For all their worldliness, sophistication and preco-
ciousness they simply lacked the wisdom and the ex-
perience to realize the consequences of such choices
as accepting rides from strangers, and being tempt-
ed by free candy and the promise of pot parties.

In rejecting their parents' . old-fogey warnings
about "strange men" young people are simply tak-
ing another position in their crash program of
"emancipation,"

Consider, for example, the blood-chilling facts
arising from a recent inquiry by the New York State
Select Committee on Crime which were detailed as
follows:

Some of the juvenile criminals will murder
with no more thought or remorse than they
would spend on a broken window or jimmied
door.

Other youngsters are being used as assassins
by youth gangs because the juvenile laws are
more lenient than those for defendants over
sixteen.

Youth gangs, which reemerged in 1971, after
a decade of inactivity, have a documented
9,000 members and possibly as many as 18,000
members, their basic functions are to commit
crimes and build arsenals ranging from auto-
matic weapons to home-fashioned bazookas.

Older gang leaders, some trained in killing in
Vietnam, are forcing youths to join gangs.

The schools have become corridors of crime,
while thousands of school-age children roam
the streets because of unenforced attendance
regulations.

Obviously the world in which young people circu-
late is far different from that which existed in the
Depression. And the greatest change has come in
economics. A "chicken" (a young male procured for
perverse sexual use) costs a lot more than a quarter
nowadays and no one is more aware of this than the
runaway. Both girls and boys either know or learn
quickly that the two cash assets they carry with
them are their youth and sex inclinations. A young
person's body "is a passport to high adventure. At
least it seems that way at the outset. But a body can
also be a one-way ticket to degradation — and a
burial plot in the dirt floor of a boathouse.

At the Port of Authority in New York young ad-
venture seekers arrive by the hundreds each month.
And as fast as the police can maneuver them back to
their homes they do: said Patrolman Al Dunne, "We
aren't on the lookout for specific runaways. If we
find one, that's everybody's good luck. What we're
doing mainly is spotting the teenage girl who has
run away from home, usually with only a couple of
dollars In her pocket but convinced she can make it
in the-Big Apple. She's dressed older than she is, has
had a couple of years work experience and honestly
believes she can market her minimal office skills.
Failing that, she can always get work as a waitress.

"But she's the girl who usually ends up hustling in
a massage parlor. The pimps are here every day —
looking for just such girls. And there's not much we

can do about it unless we get to her first. The pimp
isnt too fussy about her looks. His clients pay for
youth™horn-rimmed glasses, even acne, prove their
maidenhood — or near-maidenhood. Men aren't as
fussy as they used to be about virginity. But there is
always a premium on youth.

"Gur record in getting girls to turn around and go
home is pretty good considering the handful of peo-
ple working the Port Authority building. But we
know our way around. The pimps become familiar
faces after a while. And even if we lose a girl we're
often able to trace her. Once a minor starts working
in a massage parlor we have the legal right to raid
it."

Male prostitution is something else — a fact of
modem life that seldom warrants more than cursory
examination, by the press. Either people are ignorant
of its existence or refuse to acknowledge it. It is one
of those distasteful subjects more easily swept under
the carpet than discussed.

But the depth to which it has penetrated modern
society is considerable and it is much more difficult
to deter than female prostitution. New York, as it is
for the girls, is the Mecca of the average youth who
has discovered some of the inner workings of hus*
tling his ass in his own small town. Like the run-
away girl he can easily be spotted by Port Authority
police but he is generally swallowed up in the crowd
before anyone can get to him.

The hustlers roam Forty-second Street, Broadway
and the theatrical neighborhood; taking up positions
along the rows of shabby pornographic, shops, record
stores and hamburger stands that line the sleazy
streets, waiting to be approached. Their clients are

the middle-aged, the lonely; some of them, avowed
homosexuals; a large number, family men from out-
of-town. That they're taking their lives in their ;
hands is ignored in the frenzy of their desires.

Even the most naive of the hustlers quickly knows
his way around. After all he's seen The Midnight
Cowboy— maybe a couple of times. And he knows
the places to hang out— how to cruise the grind mov-
ies, the hamburger stands, the gay bars, the public
lavatories where homosexual contacts are freely
made. To help him out, there are all sorts of guide
books available produced by the underground press.
Then even catalogue the clientele— listing spots ca-
tering to ieathermen, blue collar workers, business
men and others on the prowl for the homosexual
pleasures available in New York.

It's a grim, sordid, catch-as-catch-can life and the
runaway who expects to become the new Big Stud in
town is soon beaten down by disillusionment. The
penalties are profound. First, he risks an encounter
"with the law but that can be counted as an occupa-
tional hazard.. Beyond this, he can be sure that
whatever drug habit he's involved with will acceler-
ate in the Big Apple. Once the bloom of youth fades
—and that happens quickly in Times Square— he's
headed for the dump heap in its various forms, a jail
term, life as a junkie, a gutter existence as a wino
and panhandler- The odds against him becoming a
well kept "boy" on Park Avenue are a million to one
—regardless of what he's read in the gay sex novels
so freely circulated these days.

But explaining the pitfalls to a young hustler is
like talking to a brick wall. There is always tomor-
row, the possibility that the right John will show up

and carry him away from the gaudy neon of Times
Square and cracking paint of his dingy furnished
room. After all, he tells himself, things weren't much
better back home.

Said Doctor Charles Lamark, "The male hustler is
a tragic figure, much more so than the female prosti-
tute. Her chances of rehabilitation are good if she
has the character to take advantages of them. Be-
sides her own will, there are agencies ready to pro-
vide help, facilities that are unavailable to the male
hustler who is left pretty much on his own. It
requires something like a jail sentence before any
agency will find him eligible for counselling or a re-
habilitation program of a public nature.

'"The real danger the young hustler faces is his ig-
norance of how repeated homosexual contact affects
his masculinity. A particular individual who hustles
may not really be a homosexual— that's always in
doubt. But given the benefit of the doubt arid as-
suming a desire to rehabilitate himself and pursue a
life as a heterosexual; he will not find it easy to do
so. Protracted homosexual .experience frequently
produces inability to perform satisfactorily in a he-
terosexual situation. The youth will discover that
he's unable to sustain erection, producing another
devastating confrontation which his life style is
poorly equipped to handle. The result can be a fur-
ther breakdown in the young man's moral fibre and
his physical resources.

It is from this army of reluctant homosexuals that
men like Dean Corll, Wayne Henley and David
Brooks emerge."*

Dean Corll, to the best knowledge available, lived
totally outside the mainstream of Houston's gay live
or of the other cities he lived in or visited. Corll was
a loner but he was aware of a gay world beyond his
own. Wayne Henley remembered that he once men-
tioned a group in Dallas that would do him some
good. David Brooks also recalled that there had been
talk around the house of the existence of a call boy
ring in Dallas.

Then came the black headlines with their grim
stories about the Houston murders. At the height of
the furor there came out of Dallas reports of a na-
tionwide homosexual procuring operation. Acting on
a tip, police raided an apartment alleged to house
the ring, arresting the ring's leader and a number of
other males, including two teenagers. In the apart-
ment police discovered catalogued files containing
the names and addresses of persons around the
country, supposedly clients.

They seized booklets containing photographs and
the names of teen-aged and young adult males avail-
able through the group which operated under the
name, The Odyssey Foundation. It also worked out a
post office box maintained in San Diego, California.
The raiding police described the apartment as a
crash^pad, a loading zone for young recruits waiting
for assignments.

The ring's existence came to light through infor-
mation supplied by a twenty-four year old gay ac-
tivist who became panicky when he believed there
might have been a link between the Dallas group
and the Houston killings.

Odyssey, it was learned, recruited boys from bus
stations and other locations frequented by teenagers.

They were called " Fellows'' and the homosexuals for
which they were procured were referred to as "spon-
sors/'

In becoming a "sponsor," the applicant was invit-
ed to fill out forms listing his preferences in boys
and how long he wanted the "fellow" in his home.
Membership dues amounted to Fifteen dollars an-
nually, plus three dollars for the booklet with pho-
tographs of the "fellows/' When a "sponsor" chose a
particular "fellow" he contacted the foundation
which put the young man on a plane to the "spon-
sor's" home. The "sponsor" was responsible for the
"fellow's" return air fare, his upkeep and pocket
money.

One of the young "fellows" who turned up on the
list turned out to be an escapee from a California
prison. A couple of youths picked up at the Dallas
home of Odyssey were booked on narcotics posses-
sion charges.

Before a youth was accepted by Odyssey he sup-
posedly underwent a ten day to three-week orienta-
tion period for the program. This, the operator of
Odyssey maintained, was intended to weed out un-
desirables.

' As a correlation to the Houston murders, the
Dallas call boy story amounted to a one-day sensa-
tion and quickly died away. What appeared at first
as a national ring of homosexual procurers turned
out to be the enterprise of someone's imagination —
and hardly a new one. Gangster Lucky Luciano, the
godfather of godfathers, seized control of prostitu-
tion briefly in New York City. Emboldened by his
success he envisioned himself as the master of a
chain of whore houses that would stretch across the

country like supermarkets.

It was the mistake of Lucky's charmed criminal
life. He ended up sentenced to jail as a common
panderer.

Prostitution, whether male or female, is not the
kind of profession that lends itself readily to mass
marketing. There are indeed flourishing call boy ser-
vices in the large cities, but they operate on a high
and expensive level. Male madams know they could
never survive by dealing in street hustlers. Their
"fellows" are drawn from the ranks of coilege stu-
dents, clerical workers, muscle builders, actors,
dancers, artists, responsible young men looking for
extra money. The majority are admitted homosex-
uals themselves and the more desirable ones are able
to earn as much as a hundred dollars a night.

Street boys belong to the world of men like Dean
Corll and among the most perceptive analyses of
Corll was that made by sociologist Laud Humphreys ■
speaking on a panel discussion on homosexuality
which was held in Laguna Beach, California, a few .
weeks after the killings became known. *

". . . many closet queens, and Corll would be in ]
that type, seem to prefer teenage boys as sexual ob- j
jects, A number of these men regularly cruise the '>
streets where boys thumb rides each afternoon when
school is over. One closet queen from my sample has
been arrested for luring boys in their early teens to
his home. This establishes, then, in terms of behav-
ior, perhaps the closest between this description and
Dean Corll's private personality.

"I note that social isolation is characteristic of the
closet queen. Generally it is more severe even than
that encountered among the 'trade,' most of whom

enjoy at least a family life. Although painfully aware
of their homosexual orientation, these men find little
solace in association with others who .share their 'de-
viant* interests fearing exposure, arrests, stigma-
tization that might result from participation in the
homosexual subculture.

"They are driven to a desperate lone-wolf sort of
activity that may prove dangerous to themselves
and the rest of society. Although it's tempting to
look for psychological explanations for their appar-
ent preference for 'chicken', the sociological ones are
evident. They resort to the more dangerous game
because of the lack of both the normative restraints
and adult markets that prevail in the more overt
subculture.

"To them the costs, financial and otherwise, of
operating among the streetcorner youth are more ac-
ceptable than those of active participation in the
gay subculture.

"Raised in the oppressive atmosphere of a small
Texas town, fearing any type of behavior that might
express his feeling, Dean Corll was driven by fear
and by a desire for protection of his job and his rep-
utation. Because of his tortured personality he was
driven away from the gay-subculture. "

"Had he ever been reached by gay liberation there
might be thirty more boys in their homes or on the
.streets of Houston, Texas."

PART THREE

1
1

"For some people murder is apparently an act of
aggression that reassures them of th^ir manhood,
Dr. Shervert Frazier, former chairman of psychiatry,
Baylor College of Medicine, currently t physician-in-
residence, McLean Hospital, Massachusetts.

How many were the young men whose blood ran
cold as they heard of the death of Dean Coril and of
the legacy of sadism and killing he left behind? How
many of them were there who mumbled, "My God!
One of those kids might have been me."

How many young men, in Houston, how many
•hitchhikers wandering through the town recalled
that they, too, had once been invited inside Corll's
white van? But for the grace of God they were not
counted among the twenty-six bodies whose decom-
posed bodies and bare bones lay wrapped in plastic
bags awaiting identification.

There must have been dozens of such boys, now a
few months, perhaps a few years older who had es-
caped death at the hands of the strapping two-
hundred pound electrician. They would never know

how close they had been to satisfying CorU's maca-
bre lusts, private passions that had gone out of con-
trol as the years slipped by and the pattern of
murder became more frequent. They could only
wonder why they had failed to accept the invitation
of Dean or Wayne to "hop in and have some fun."
Had they been saved by their own intuition, the
sudden intrusion of a passerby, the steady gaze of a
policeman noticing the pick-up? The kind of gaze
that would cause Dean Corll to back off?

Years of cruising the streets and highway had
sharpened CorU's sixth sense. He knew the type of
boy who would be most vulnerable to his blandish-
ments. He could recognize the youth who might re-
sist, the boy strong enough to fight back a sexual ad-
vance. Arid most dangerous of all, someone unafraid
to report any incident to the police.

They were the lucky ones, the boys who escaped
the shallow graves.

No one will ever know how many youths wandered
briefly into CorlFs path and then disappeared into
the misty pack of boys he couldn't "make." And no
one will ever learn their names. For theirs is a lonely
secret they probably will never dare to share. For
now, it is enough to shake the horrible memory out of
their minds and to pray that it never arises to haunt
them in their dreams. Young boys, no less than
young girls, keep their own counsel about the ad-
vances of strangers. Why make a fuss? It has hap-
pened before, It will probably happen again.

And who would have believed an accusation
against the genial thirty-three year old bachelor they
called The Candy Man"!

Not the simple working people of the Heights in

Houston where he became a well-known and famil-
iar figure, nor those who knew him in his youth in
the Texas towns he lived in. Psychiatrists, though,
would have wondered at the perfection of Dean
CorU's image — the all-American boy who seemingly
did nothing wrong, the kid who was so devoted to his
mother, so unfailingly polite to everyone, whose
manners could never be faulted. They would have
wondered about a lot of things— Dean's preoccupa-
tion with keeping his appearance youthful, of want-
ing to act like a kid even when he was past thirty.
They would have wanted to know more about a ma-
ture man who spent so much of his time with male
teenagers, who at thirty-three, was still single.

According to Guy, the youth who had replaced
Wayne Henley in Dean's affections, he acted
"crazy" for a man his age, doing things like wading
in a pond at night,: skipping down the streets like a
young boy and becoming very emotional at the
slightest hint that Guy might be uncomfortable
around him.

Said Mary Henley, "He seemed always to be with
young boys. I remember once he flared when I asked
him about it. The only other time I ever saw him
^ angry was when I made a joke about his age. . He
didn't like that at all."

After Dean's death there was some reluctance
among his friends to discuss him. But eventually his
life story emerged and while superficially it ap-
peared quite commonplace all the clues were present
to indicate that Corll was a troubled young man
sorely in need of counselling.

He was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on Christ-
mas Eve, the son of Arnold and Mary Corll.

' , 1 7, .

Both were twenty-three at-the time. Theirs was a
stormy marriage and when Dean was six years old
they were divorced. Besides the personality dif-
ferences which Mary Corll claimed had produced
the separation there were disagreements about how
Dean was being raised.

The father apparently feared that his wife was
spoiling the child and was turning him into a
"mama's boy" — a prediction which subsequent
years proved true. When Coril, Sr. was drafted Mary
moved. Dean and his younger brother Stanley into a
trailer home outside Memphis, near the Air ; Force
base where her husband was stationed. They saw
each other frequently and decided to try marriage
again. That was when they moved to Houston. It
was 1950 and despite their best efforts the second
marriage failed to take. The Corlls were divorced
again.

The family lived in various Houston homes for
three, years. It was around this time the doctors dis-
covered Dean had a heart murmur which barred him
from participation in school athletics. Still, he was
developing into an aggressive youngster who enjoyed
taking on the role of leader. If he couldn't play
.games, he still could hike, and he used to lead the
kids into the woods on snake-hunting expeditions.

When Mary married Jim West,- a salesman, the
boys moved with her and their stepfather to Vidor,
eight miles east of Beaumont, Texas near the coast.

Dean entered Vidor High School as a freshman
where he turned out to be an average student— poor
in English but ^ood at math. But the, teachers- liked
him, especially his manners and appearance. He
never gave them trouble. Because he failed English

in his senior year Dean's graduation was postponed
until the end of summer school in 1958.

It was while they lived in Vidor that Mary West
went into, the candy business— making pralines in
the kitchen of their home. Dean used to go into the
woods and gather the pecans in the Neches River
bottoms. He also took care of the deliveries, and
played a substantial part in the beginning of a busi-
ness that would serve the family handily over the
years.

Corll got along extremely well at school, played
the trombone with the school band. When the
murders hit the headlines there were old friends of.
Dean in Vidor who simply refused to believe that the
so-called "homosexual monster" was the same boy
they had known in high school. Now grown men, his
former classmates, protested that he gave all the ap-
pearances of being perfectly normal, that like theirs,
his interest lay with girls. He often double-dated at
movies, and dances, "Girls liked Dean," everyone
said, "and there was nothing about him that would
lead you to believe otherwise,"

Said another friend, "You have to remember what
kind of town Vidor was at the time. Terribly strict,
completely Baptist. I doubt that if you asked ten
people what a 'homosexual* was that three of them
would understand what you were talking about.

"I'd say that the only thing odd about Dean was
his devotion to his mother. But, hell, that's not un-
common among young boys, especially when they
come from broken homes. It's natural to cling to the
only parent you've got. "

After Dean graduated from High School he con-
tinued his dual job with his mother's candy business

—helping her with making up the pralines and deli-
vering them to the drug stores and restaurants where
they were sold.

In I960, when his grandmother became widowed,
Dean went to Indiana to stay with her, remaining
and working there for about two years. One of the
reasons for leaving his mother may have been the
fact that - there appeared to be little love lost be-
tween him and his stepfather, Jim West. The sales-
man suspected the boy's homosexual tendencies and
voiced his worries to Mary. She refused to listen to
them. Dean returned to Houston in 1962 at about
the same time that the Wests were divorced.

The family moved into the Heights where Mary
West set up her shop in the kitchen and sold her
merchandise from the lower garage which she had
converted into a store. The family business was in-
corporated with Mary West as president. Dean, vice-
president and Stanley, the secretary-treasurer. A
half-sister, Joyce, also helped out.

Dean Corll was twenty-four in 1964 when he was
drafted into the Army and sent to Fort Polk, Loui-
siana, for basic training and then to Fort Benning,
Georgia to attend radio repair school. The Army
nest sent him to Fort Hood near Killen in central
Texas; But Corll decided to apply for a hardship
discharge claiming that he was needed in his fami-
ly's business. The Army granted this request and
Dean left the service on June 11, 1945, just ten
months after his induction.

According "to "the Army, Corll's .record was ex-
cellent. There were no black marks whatsoever, no
indications of homosexuality— nothing. Still there
remain some unanswered questions. Whatever hap-

pened to the heart; disease that barred Dean from
participating in juvenile athletics when he was in
grade school? Why was his induction delayed until
he was twenty-four? Had he claimed hardship before
entering the service? v

And, most important, what happened whu> Dean
was in the Army that decided him to apply for a
discharge after only ten months? If he was vital to
the business at that time, wasn't he just as impor-
tant a year earlier?

No matter how you look at it, there appears some-
thing mysterious about CoriTs brief fling in the
Army and to one friend, at least, it marked the turn-
ing point in his life, "It's my guess that he turned
fag then," the young man said. "I saw signs of it
when he got out, the way he acted, how he looked at
me. He kept wanting to touch me. That wasn't how
I'd known him. There was something about him that
was unsettling,, so I simply stopped seeing him.
Then I moved away from Houston and never gave
the man a second thought — until there he was with
his name and picture all over the newspapers. It was
horrible. I didn't know what to think. Then I read
about all those young boys. I'd never suspected any-
thing like that in the time I knew him before he
went into the Army. Sure, Dean was nice, to kids —
like , everyone else. But he wasn't chasing them
around— or anything like that,"

Said Dr. Charles Lamark, "If it is true — and there
is every reason to lend substance to the belief— that
Dean Corll's homosexual tendencies were awakened
in the Army, we can make some suppositions about
the turn in his character afterward.

"I would suggest that Dean Corll was a virgin

when he started his military service, despite being
twenty -four. Whatever sexual contact he had experi-
enced was evidently confined to youthful encounters
common to most boys^mutuai masturbation and
the like.

"If he suspected homosexual tendencies in himself
he appeared to have done nothing about them. They
didn't seem to worry him. He gave the impression of
being a busy, happy-go-lucky fellow, good enough in
school to get by and content in his work. Family life
satisfied him as shown in his affection for his mother
and willingness to go to live with his grandmother at
a time that she needed him. On the surface, at least,
he appeared to have no problems.

"Things undoubtedly changed once Dean entered
the Army. Probably for the first time he saw a
clearer picture of himself and realized his sexual in-
clinations lay with men. Without the subject to an-
swer directly we can only surmise what happened.
He could have taken two directions that would ac-
count for his eventual behavior. He might have suc-
cumbed to his homosexual leanings and hated him-
self afterward or taken the predatory, aggressive role
in a homosexual encounter and been rejected."

"I. am inclined to the latter. I rather suspect that
Dean finally decided to try himself out in a homo-
sexual experience. I don't, think he was worried
about the consequences. Or that he feared hating it
after its consummation. Far from it, I suspect Dean
was getting around to fulfilling a need that had been
gnawing at him for a long time. Something he'd
been afraid to try at home for fear of the con-
sequences. His mother might find out— or there
would be some sort of scandal. Now, thrown into an

all-male society where he could plainly see evidence
of homosexual activity by the other soldiers, it was
his time to try it out."

"And I have a feeling that he was rejected— total-
ly and rudely by whoever he chose for his initiation.
Not because Dean had made an overt proposition
but because he performed unsatisfactorily. For any
number of reasons. His lack of experience, some in-
hibition that suddenly showed itself or perhaps a
physical lack— such as an infantile penis. Size of the
sex organ is important in a homosexual encounter—
a large penis being highly prized."

"Corll would not have been the first young man to
have his life blighted by his initial encounter. Such
an occurrence is not limited to the homosexual. It
frequently happens in the heterosexual world: actu-
ally, it is found most often in that particular sexual
area,"

"The old theory that a young man's first en-
counter is best handled by a know-h>all4ady of easy
virtue has long since proved a fallacy. The facts
show that more young men have been turned off by
sexual relations under the guidance of a professional
than have learned the intricacies of sex. It has been
shown that the bad taste such encounters leave be-
hind often produces damage, sometimes perma-
nent,"

"In psychiatric case histories more than one man
has confessed that his first heterosexual experience
proved such a disaster that he either chose homosex-
uality as an outlet or preferred continence, It is not a
major problem—not something the individual is in-
capable of overcoming, The problem lies in its delica-
cy. Men are not inclined to discuss it, much less

submit it to an expert for treatment."

"When a put-down is part of a homosexual en-
counter, it can be particularly cruel, especially to
someone who had reached Dean Corll's age, suffer-
ing the added doubts of being unsure of his sexual
identity."

"In the gay world there's nothing polite about a
'one night stand' and someone who turns out to be a
'lousy lay' is just that — a waste of time. And his
partner has no second thoughts about letting him
know it."

"That, I feel confident, was the pattern that
turned Dean Corll away from again seeking aex with
his peers. His world was typical of the usual child
molester — someone who sought satisfaction from
young people because of being incapable of attract-
ing attention at his own age level. Corll wasn't a true
pedophile in that he preferred victims in their teens.
Still the approach was the same—luring them with
candy when they were very young, baiting them
with pot and booze when they had graduated to that
stage. Corll paid for his sex at an age when the
average homosexual would have been horrified by
the idea. But that clearly was the only way he could
find companions for his purposes."

With Dean out of the Army the candy business
was reorganized and moved to new quarters, directly
across from an elementary school. Dean became the
general manager and rented his frst apartment
away from home.

Corll installed a play area in the back room of the
candy store, putting in a pool room and other de-

vices that were intended to amuse the kids. One of
them was a huge green frog whose eyes would light
up when the telephone rang. The back room of the
candy store became extremely popular and only one
mother of record ever worried about her son spend-
ing so much time there, accepting the free candy
that Dean offered.

What went on in the back room of the candy fac-
tory will, of course, never be known; since it is un-
likely that any of the boys seduced by Corll in the
sixties will come forward to shed psychological light
on one of the most notorious mass murderers in his-
tory. But authorities believe that hundreds of boys
may have been his victims* lured into consenting to
oral sodomy; some, just once; others, many times.
Because Corll was The Candy Man and the tempta-
tions were great.

There was another marriage for Dean's mother,
but that also failed to take, and in 1968 the Houston
candy business was dissolved and Mary went to Co-
lorado, leaving Dean behind.

For the first time in his life he was on his own.
Corll kept in touch with his father, Arnold Corll s
who had settled in Houston with, his second wife. He
decided, like his father, to become an electrician and
signed up for a training course which led to his em-
ployment with the Houston Lighting and Power
Company.

David Brooks was a boy Dean had known since
the lad was ten. He was fourteen at the time Dean
found himself free as a breeze — no longer bound to
his mother's apron strings and out from under the
burden of working in the family business.

His earnings were no longer tossed into the family

pot and he could spend his money as he chose.
Young Brooks became the first to discover that Dean
Corll was willing to pay for the special kicks he
craved and that, as a meal ticket, he was as substan-
tial as anything around — at least in the Heights
where money was usually hard to come by.

Unlike Wayne Henley whose arrest and part in the
gruesome murders evoked surprise and shock among
the people of the Heights who knew him, there were
fewer kind words for David Brooks. Admittedly, peo-
ple knew less about him than they did about Wayne,
but he appears to have given the impression of a
not-too-bright, surly youth, inclined to pick fights
with kids younger and smaller than himself and not
beneath knocking girls around.

Like Dean and Wayne, Brooks was the product of
a broken home, born in Beaumont in 1955 and, in
his early school years, a good student. But his grades
began to falter and he became a drop-out.

After their divorce the senior Brooks moved to
Houston while the mother remained in Beaumont.
Young David divided his time between them— and
this may account for the sharp change in his scho-
lastic achievements and in his personality.

Brooks, fourteen and rootless, foCmd a com-
panionship in Dean Corll that obviously provided a
need in his life, He began staying at Dean's house
and eventually moved in with him. They became
lovers but it was a strange affair that appeared to
have begun as a commercial venture. At first, Dean
paid David five dollars for sex and then suggested
that there was more where that came from— as
much as ten dollars for any new boy he brought to
the apartment.

-80

So David started bringing his friends and the
ghastly drama of torture and murder began as David
recounted in his confession.

At first Wayne Henley was only another of the
boys David brought along but he stayed to become
the third member of the murder ring. Like David
Brooks, Wayne was enticed by Dean's promise of
money for sexual favors. He had been around a bit
and being paid for something he enjoyed plainly
didn't bother him. Wayne always needed money.

By the time Wayne came into the picture Corll
was well into his murder spree and in looking back
and piecing together the bits and pieces of informa-
tion supplied by Henley and Brooks, police are of
the opinion that Dean intended killing him as well.
Dean saw qualities in Wayne that were missing in
Brooks, Wayne was bright, possessed some elements
of charm and was basically gregarious. He would
serve as second pimp.

Wayne was conned gently into his role, lured by
promises of money that ranged from Dean's normal
five and ten dollars fee to two hundred dollars and
even a new car. Wayne had dropped out of high
school in the ninth grade to help support his mother.
He hoped to get into the Army but was rejected
because of his lack of education. He eked out a liv-
ing doing odd jobs, so the money from Dean was
especially welcome.

No one suspected a thing about his double life.
Wayne successfully gave the impression of being a
dutiful son and his own minister, the Rev. Matt
Chambers, had only praise for him, "Wayne was
just one of- the crowd. When he was on the play-
ground or in the fellowship hall with the other kids

he was no different from any ether boy."

The Rev. Chambers said that Henley, his mother
and brothers were members of the Fulbright Meth-
odist Church, five doors down the street; from their
home.

The minister explained that Henley took f>art in
the evening recreation programs sponsored by the
church and attended services frequently.

He said Henley often talked" with him about the
pressure he felt as a breadwinner for his mother and
brothers.

"You take a boy/' said Rev. Chambers, "a sensi-
tive boy, I would say — and he takes on such respon-
sibility at an early age, this would cause an upheav-
al in a boy's life."

The very normality of their lives gave strength
and provided the cover that so effectively masked the
sordid activities of this unholy trio. There was
Dean Corll, the quiet, self-effacing:, eligible bachelor,
going about his job as an electrician for the power
company just as he'd done everything in his life—
meticulously. Then there was Wayne* a bright kid.
forced by circumstance to fend for himself but who
still went to church and took driving lessons, hoping
to improve his chances for a job. And David Brooks,
what about him? Not a bad boy— not at all. Some-
one, rather, to be pitied. Without a real home, tack-
ing the ties a young man needed to get his feet iirm r
ly on the ground. No wonder he sought out that
older man, Dean Corll, for companionship.

The boy had seen his mother, for example* only
once in four years, on a visit she made to Houston a
month before the murder of Dean Corll. By tele-
phone from her home in Tioga, Louisiana the

mother, now Mrs. Mary Chandler said, 'Tm his
mother. I love him regardless. It's hard to see the
bad in him, That doesn't mean I condone anything
he's done. It's a real shock."

Now a nurse, Mrs. Chandler was divorced from
Brooks' father in 1961. The son's implication in the
murder obviously had seriously dislocated her life.
She complained of finding it difficult to work under
the pressures imposed by her concern for David and
the inquiries made by the press.

When reporters found Mary Henley in her home,
waiting nervously for news on the eve of the disclo-
sure of the killings she told them, "I don't under-
stand this man. He ate Easter dinner with us and
worked on my car. He loved kids and he would drive
over in his white van with a black couch in the back
and a dozen kids would pile in the back and he
would take them for rides."

"He did a lot of business with that truck," said
Eugene Swandler, CorU's next door neighbor on
Lamar Drive. "He always backed that van up so the
side doors would open to the house. It was always
parked that way — even after dark.

"I know it sounds strange never to have a conver-
sation with your neighbor — not even saying hello,
but he wouldn't talk to me. But he spoke to my boy.

"Now, when I think of that, it gives me the creeps.
He was very careful not to become acquainted with
the people around here,"

Swandler said he did notice CorU's peculiar hours
for coming and going and he said he knew and liked
Corll's father.

"Emotionally, he must be devastated," Swandler
said.

And so the drama sped its course. David and
Wayne picked up the young victims. They would
lure them to the several apartments Dean Corll
moved into, always careful never to leave a trace of
the crimes that had been committed behind their
locked doors and curtained window. One landlord
recalled that he had ftiund what he believed to be a
bullet hole in the wall of an apartment Corll rented.
But since he wasn't sure he repaired it and made no
issue of the discovery. The victims' mouths were
always taped, so there would be no .sounds of
screams to awaken the neighbors whose friendship
Corll systematically avoided.

Sometimes the boys were killed on the very day
they were seduced. Then there were boys Dean
liked. They were allowed to hang around for several
days, but then their captor's will broke down. They
had to be killed.

When did it all begin?

No one knows and it is doubtful that even Brooks
and Henley can shed light on the first murder that
triggered CorH's chain of killings. Both youths have
told police that Corll boasted having killed several
youngsters before Wayne and David came into his
life. They were inclined to believe him, for there had
to be a first. From the killings they were part of, it
was clear Corll knew exactly what he was doing.

Police believe that the first murder was born of
\ fear. Corll probably entrapped a youngster in his car,
invited him to drop by his apartment for a visit,
promising him marijuana or a drink. Then seduced
him. They presume the boy was young enough to
threaten Corll, to lead him to fear that he, might tell
his parents of the incident. This was the sort of ex-

posure Dean couldn't risk. So he killed him.

Did he have the boat house then? No, not if the
statements of Henley and Brooks have any sub-
stance. They maintained the bodies were shipped to
California — at least that is what Corll told them.
Looking at it in another light, it is conceivable that
Coril, fearful of incrimination so close to home,
chose to drive his first series of corpses to California
for burial there. That is what he might have meant
by saying the bodies had "been shipped." When
Corll became involved with Brooks and Henley he
was skilled at the murder game. It was dangerous
and he knew it. He probably was careful with his
words. He may have used "shipped" deliberately—
to throw the boys off the track.

At his work a fellow electrician recalled a conver-
sation about killing. Corll, who had not taken an
especially vocal role in it, suddenly looked around at
his colleagues and said, 'The first time you kill it's
difficult. After that it gets easier."

When David and Wayne became his accomplices,
the killings weren't always easier. Wayne told that
he found it difficult to strangle one victim. Dean
came to his aid and helped him. But even his strong
arms were not enough. So he shot the boy.

It was all so cool, so calm, so cold-blooded.
Murder and sex. Sex and murder. They had become
one.

Everything was geared to Dean CorlFs macabre
life style. He was the evil genius, the master. Wayne
and David were his slaves, tied to his will by their
involvement in the murders and their hunger for his
money which he dribbled out to them in tiny sums.
Dean was the most important man in their lives and

he never allowed them to forget it.

They plotted their moves with the skill of chess
masters, taking stock of each situation, alerting
themselves for special activity during vacation
weeks when more kids would be on the streets and
highways, roaming around with nothing to do, the
perfect fish for Dean CorH's catch.

He liked a certain type, very young, very white,
frail, not too muscular. He feared anyone who might
give him a fight. Wayne and David were the proto-
types of the boys he fancied— but he had wearied of
them. Their young bodies had served his purpose
once— but that was in the past.

Often they went out "cruising" all together.
Sometimes they would pair off. Sometimes Brooks
would bring an old friend along. Wayne did the
same— just as he had invited Tim Kerley on the
night that climaxed with CorlTs murder.

They'd drive the. van, picking up kids and offer-
ing them rides. Once the youngster was in the car
there came the suggestion, the offer of beer and
grass. Then there were the parties. These were
planned affairs and because they included several
guests CorlTs murder instincts were cautious. They
served a useful purpose though— giving him a line
on the "chicken" available.

And while they cruised and picked and murdered
the sycophants lived in fear of their own lives. Both
Wayne and David told police they were certain that
one day Corli would turn on them and kill them too.
Certainly that was Dean's intention on the night of
August 7, 1973. Brooks even insisted that the nearest
he came to death was a day when both Corll and
Wayne attacked him, knocked him to the floor and

would have strangled him except that he begged his
way out of it.

And both boys considered the possibility of escap-
ing from the trap in which they'd been caught —
killing Corll themselves. And, at one time, Wayne
prayed that Corll would kill him — ending his double
life.

CorlTs murder pattern showed no signs of abate-
ment; instead it was on' the increase. In 1970, there
was one victim. There were six in 197^, seven in 1972
and nine in 1973.

But murdering Coril had never worked out as the
boys planned. Something went wrong. Usually they
became so drugged on paint fumes or marijuana
that they forgot what they were doing.

What sort of torture did Corll indulge in?

Evidently neither Brooks or Henley volunteered
much information in this area in their statements to
the police — perhaps for fear of further incrimination
and added charges. At the time the bodies were dug
out of the beach and the boatshed there had been
rumors of mutilation, of vital organs hacked away
and dumped into plastic sacks. Henley sought to
minimize the torture aspects by insisting they just
"fooled around," intimating that the worst that hap-
pened went no further then plucking pubic hairs
from the vital regions. He did, however, accuse Corll
of excessive violence as he sodomized his victims
anally when they were tied to his torture board- This
appeared to give the man his greatest satisfaction.
Brooks made the same accusation against Henley.

While police were calling Dean Corll a sadistic

killer, a perverted clown, there were those who re-
fused to believe it, his own mother, of course, his fa-
ther and stepfather as well. The family told Joy
Staneffer of The Houston Post of their faith that
Dean Corll had nothing to do with the siayings.
"They've convicted him without any proof," said
Mrs. Corll.

The picture they retained of Dean Coril was one of
an easygoing, helpful young man, normal in every
way. They" believed Dean "found out something was
wrong" three weeks before he died. Mrs. Corll had
been giving him tablets for an upset stomach for
about three weeks.

"If he had been doing this for three years,'- said
his father, "why hadn't he been having an upset
stomach all this time?"
/ "He told me he might have to leave town in a
hurry," volunteered the dead man's stepmother- "I
asked him to tell me why. He told me he was having
some kind of trouble." ..- ■

The Corlls raised a number of interesting ques-
tions which they hope will one day be answered;

Why did the authorities call Corll the ring-
leader when there was the possibility that Hen-
ley and Brooks could have been lying in order
to put the blame on Corll?

Have the police relied only on the words of
the two youths?

How could the police be sure there were no
others involved? Could Dean have been killed
because he knew too much? Maybe there was a
homosexual ring in Houston, just like that un-
covered in Dallas.

Why has no one come up with proof of de-
viate behavior in Dean's past?

If Henley was bound with tape over the
mouth when he came to on the night he killed
Dean how could he have "sweet-talked" his
way out of being slain, as he claimed?

Finally, if the accounts of the party in the
bedroom in Dean's house were true, why was
the body found in the hallway near the tele-
phone?

The Corlls believe their son was trying to call for
help.

Whatever the firmness of their faith in Dean Corll,
his secret life has rudely shaken their public life.
Things have quieted down in the year since the
murders but, when the search for the bodies was at
its height, they were the victims of dozens of anony^
mous calls; They were plagued by photographers

' and reporters and time and time again they asked
themselves if ever again they would know peace. Or

I would they forever live in the dark shadows cast by

* The Candy Man who adored children?

The Corlls weren't alone in their belief that Dean

t " was innocent of the killings. Several of his neighbors

i volunteered their disbelief in his guilt to reporters.

[ Larry Thompson, for instance, described Corll as a
"real good guy and a good neighbor." Did. Thompson
believe that Corll committed the crimes? "Personal-
ly, no. I don't. I really don't."

4 To a man his neighbors on Lamar Drive agreed

a. that he was a nice, quiet conservative, a fellow who
wore his hair short, who regularly mowed his lawn,
kept to himself and minded his own business.

Then there was "the woman" in Dean's life— a
woman who successfully avoided the spotlight by
identifying herself only as Betty. She told reporters
of theirfriendship.

Betty, a 30-year old divorcee with two children,
knew Dean since she was fifteen. His friendship
seemed terribly important to her and, while she was
willing to talk about it, she insisted on anonymity
because of the children. "They, used to call him
■"'Daddy,'" she said.

According to Betty she had been in all of the
apartments Corll occupied and never noticed any-
thing to arouse her suspicions. She said that the
children often visited them and were given the run
of the place. Dean never interfered.

"If he had those things in there (the torture in-
struments) why did he let them wander around?"

There was so much she couldn't understand,
Dean's devotion to her, the quiet way he did things
for her, like slipping her cash when she was broke
before pay day. The nights they spent at the movies
holding hands. The affectionate way he kissed her
good-night,

She was unable to associate all these things with a
man the police called a mass murderer.

Betty admitted she knew both Wayne and David
—but not at all well. She was inclined to drop in on
Dean at his various apartments whenever she felt
inclined. She often found the boys there— but never
under conditions that would have embarrassed her.
"This is what I don't understand," she told Houston
Post reporter Miriam Kass, "I could have come
upon all those things."

"One time he made the statement that Tve gotto

get away from the boys.' " She did not understand
what he was driving at, nor did Betty have an expla-
nation for the statement Dean made a few nights
before his murder, their last meeting. "I'm driving
to Colorado/ 1 he said- "Whatever you do, don't tell
David I'm leaving."

Betty admitted that she didn't especially care for
Wayne Henley and when she was asked about the
charges that Dean had masterminded the murders
she replied, "I don't believe he killed all those boys,
I don't, believe he was capable of killing anyone. Of
course, I could be prejudiced, since I cared so much
about him.' 1

In the last weeks of his life Dean had been in
touch with his mother in Colorado. He had told her
he was in trouble and in the course of their conversa-
tion mentioned smoking marijuana. Mrs. West, ve-
hement in her defense of her son, said, "I told him
that taking dope was no way out. I said, 'You'll only
carry your problems to the next life. You might as
well take care of them here.' "

Corll must have had suicide on his mind for he an-
swered that things might be easier in the next life.

In another telephone call to his mother before his
death Mrs. West had the distinct impression that he
was dodging someone, but Dean wouldn't say what
he was running from. He told his mother that he
would see her in Colorado within a few weeks.

Mrs. West insisted she had no idea of what kind of
trouble her son might be in, but there was no sugges-
tion that he was involved in anything like homosex-
ual activities.

""He wasn't a homosexual," she insisted. "He was
used' somehow, by the youths who have accused him

91-

of killing the young boys/'

Mrs. West described Dean as "loyal, obedient,
helpful, a loving and good normal boy."

But, she added, "He was the kind of person who
never wanted to get close enough to anyone so they
could get ties on him. He had seen so many broken
marriages/'

She said her son always looked after his younger
brother and half-sister. "He was always so popular
with younger kids. His nieces and nephews all loved
him because he was so good to them."
> Remembering the days of the candy store in the
Heights she said, "Kids flocked around him. He'd
let them in nights to play penny ante or pool. He
was always giving them rides on his motorcycle/'

Over at the Heights it was a different story.

While the headlines poured out their stories of the
bodies uncovered and the relatives of Dean Corll
spoke so nobly of his goodness one mother of four
confessed, "I haven't slept for three nights. We were
always worried about our little girls. Suddenly we
find it. was our boys we should have been cautioning
all along," -

. Said another mother, "Before this it was dope
moving in. The neighborhood has just gone down.
My family is moving out. The kids are afraid, and
they've got reason to be, when this kind on thing can
happen."

Regardless of what was said by the people of the
Heights, the relatives of Dean Corll, the statement s
of the police, the parents of the victims, the nagging
question remained unanswered, "How could such a
thing have happened?"

The following appeared on the editorial page of

the Houston Post:

The fact that so many parents of missing
boys have expressed bitterness at what they
felt to be a lack of interest and action at the
time of the making of first reports is a fact that "
the Police Department and the whole city must
take seriously. The city must provide some re-
course to citizens in time of distress and fear. If
our police department is so understaffed and
overburdened that it cannot look into the mat-
ter of a missing child— perhaps a runaway, but
perhaps also kidnapped or murdered — then the
City Council must enlarge and improve the Po-
lice Department and its equipment.

A team should be given time to interview
distraught parents to distinguish where possi-
ble between a runaway and a child who may be
in desperate need of police help. The Police
Department should be equipped to plot miss-
ing children on a map, to use modern computer
programs and communications to seek out not
only missing children but those who prey on
the young. Some of these fledglings are being
pushed from the nest, some leave It prema-
turely — but some are being seized and borne
away.

Said Dr. Shervert Frazier, former chairman of
psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine and now,
physician-in-residence at McLean Hospital, "Many
people have impulses like those found in Houston.
You can see it all in the films being shown in the big

cities now. They are full of sex and torture, often
with homosexual aspects and youngsters as victims.

"Obviously the films strike a responsible note in
the many people who pay to see them."

Frazier didn't claim that such films cause crime
but he did point out that the association between
crime and violence goes deep in our culture— even
though people may not act it out or consciously rec-
ognize it.

"In every Western you see, the hero kills some-
body in order to get the heroine," he pointed out.
"This guy she's going to bed with is a murderer, but
they're walking into the sunset."

"Often sadistic people have themselves been -bru-
talized in childhood, according to Dr. Frazier. I
always ask about discipline. Was sexual humiliation
part of it? Were you humiliated by being undressed
and then spanked? Were you spanked in front of
friends?

"For some people murder is apparently an act of
aggression that reassures them of their manhood, A
lot of murderers we saw in Texas went immediately
after the crime up to Nuevo Laredo and had as
many as twenty sexual encounters in the next
twenty-four hours."

Frazier, it should be noted, has studied mass mur-
derers in Texas, New York, Massachusetts and Ca-
nadian prisons and hospitals.

Said Dr; John W. Money, one of the nation's
authorities on sexual development: "There are thou-
sands of kids reported missing, according to today's
television, and the police just threw up their hands
and said they couldn't trace all lost teenagers and
runaway teenagers.

"So in a sense, this represents a failure of the
social system to be able to cope with a much, much
bigger problem in our society and that is— I guess
you'd call it— the 'generation gap* although that's
saying it a bit too simply. But our society has be-
come, too assembly-line. Many young kids can't cope
with their families and they have to run away, and
then nobody can cope with finding out where they've
gone to. That's why his kind of things could go on ^
to the extraordinary extent that it did before any-
body found it out and that to me is as important as
that there are lust killers.

"There have been lust killers since Nero, but
there's not been anyone who lived in a social envi-
ronment in which the society was so organized; of
disorganized, that it could let them get away with it.

"If we were living in a society in which peopje did
not get so stigmatized, if they admitted their sexual
obsessions, we wouldn't have this sort of thing going
on, because people would admit what was wrong
with them. Other people would know, and there
would be at least some chance to help out before
things got as far out of hand as they did this time."

PART FOUR

Shock In The Gay Community

"After the initial shock, most Gays have fearfully
wandered how badly this Corll horror will damage
gay progress. We know how very fragile our post-
1950 gains are. " — Jim Kepner, writing in the Homo-
phile publication, The Advocate.

Once, when the times were less enlightened, a
mass killer like Dean Corll and his disciples could
have been labelled simply as "monsters" and every-
one would have been satisfied; the press, the public,
police, religious leaders, head shrinkers as well as
other groups with either an immediate or peripheral
concern. There would have been no objections.

That era, fortunately, has slipped into the dim
but not altogether distant past, and even monsters
have the right to be catalogued as psychopaths, and
homosexuals have the privilege of protesting the la-
belling of the Houston mass murders as purely a
manifestation of the killers' sexual orientation.

One of the more articulate voices of Gay Libera-
tion belongs to The Advocate, a Los Angeles-based
publication, which does an extraordinary job of cov-

ering the news of the gay community week after
week, wielding a facile pencil in respect to the inter-
ests it represents. An editorial called What Can We
Say summed: up the publication's feelings toward
the Houston murders. It follows in full:

Only the two extremes in gay life — the deep-
ly closeted closet queen and the 100% "out per-
son" surrounded constantly by Gays at work
and at play — may fail to be concerned by the
potential disaster that lurks for all Gays in the
Houston tragedy. There can be little doubt
that we have suffered a public relations
catastrophe of major magnitude and that the
effects of this may be far reaching.

We need not keep repeating over and over
again how sorry we are for the victims in Hous-
ton. Of course we are* as are all decent people,
including ourselves. Our sympathies go, too, to
their families, left only with heartrending
memories. There is no reason Gays should have
to defend themselves over the murders; there is
no reason homosexuality itself should be under
fire."

And yet we are on the defensive. Accusations
seem to leap at us from every front page; "Ho-
mosexual torture -murder ring," "homosexual
murderer/' "Homosexual sadist" and on and
on; What should we say? What can we say?
Well, what is there to say but simply that the
man was a lunatic? There have always been
madmen stalking the earth, and there are X
number of madmen with us today, and chances
are that a statistical number of them — 5 per

100

cent, 10 per cent, or whatever — are homosexual
madmen. We can elaborate on that, for the
very dense, but beyond that simple point, there
is really nothing else to say.

We can only hope that the intelligent
members of the hetero Establishment— those
on whom we depend for the slow progress we
are making in securing our rights— will see that
the Houston massacre is not relevant to our
fight for justice and will not follow the igno-
rant, bigoted segment of the population.

The significance of the Advocate's apprehension
over the mass media's emphasis on the homosexual
aspects of the Houston massacre requires explana-
liun. It would be over-simplification to suggest that
another minority — black or Hispanlc^be substitut-
ed for "homosexual" to achieve a clearer picture of
the publication's bitterness, but it does dramatize
the nature of the mass indictment.
As the Advocate pointed out, in the simplest of
. language, Dean Corll was a madman, and madmen
\ exist in proportionate numbers in every segment of
society. They certainly are not exclusively homosex-
ual; moreover, the history of mass murders reveals
that homosexually inspired killings are the excep-
' tion rather than the rule.

{ The media carefully avoided this distinction or
did it? The newspaperman is a creature of habit and
the most charitable viewpoint in this instance is to
, suspect that he was following the old-time rule of
! using the most sensational description, the word
| that rings a bell and sticks with the reader. That
there was real police malice behind the over-worked

\ 101

homosexual implication is to be doubted. Still, that
does not change the complexion of the harm done to
a minority that is just beginning to flex its muscles
in a slow, uphill battle to achieve social and legal
civil rights and shudders at the threat of backlash
that a horrendous crime like the Corll killings can
produce.

And there can be little doubt that a shudder of
fear sped through the ranks of gay activists in Texas
and the Southwest as the cold, black headlines of
the Houston Massacre spun their tale of horror day
after day.

Wrote Jim Kepner in The Advocate:

After the initial shock most Gays have fear-
fully wondered how badly this Corll horror will
damage gay progress.

. We know how very fragile our post-1950
gains are. We've talked to veterans of the pre^
Hitler German homophile movement who
never got over seeing their prospering clubs and
magazines swept away and their membership
forced into hiding, exile or Nazi death camps.
And v/e have feared lest our movement be like-
wise swept aside in a riptide of reaction.

Despite the sudden blossoming of hundreds
of U.S. gay publications and groups, where
none were visible twenty-five years ago, despite
our new access to the media, does there remain
what Dorr Legg of ONE, INC., calls 'The
Sleeping Beast— a not so tolerant silent major-
ity which may permit us to strut a bit hut will
rise up and destroy us if we really provoke it?

Many conservative Gays think this silent

majority will never relinquish its homophobia
but will tolerate or ignore us if we are incon-
spicuous {as we used to be) and perform those
j social functions which only we can do welL

1 Though half the Archie Bunkers are too lazy to

launch overt attacks against the objects of
their spleen, and half the rest don't know we
exist, the remainder would gladly lynch us, if
| given leadership and a pretext.
I This pessimistic view (seeing us helpless be-

- fore forces which might eradicate * our frail
■* movement at any time) would require us to
keep a low profile, convincing our moderate op-
ponents of our harmlessness, while making sure
we never give the real enemy pretext to strike us
down.

So to those who see any gay assertiveness as
the catalyst which might ignite the Sleeping
Beast, something like the Corll-Henley
murders, combining the worst fears heterosex-
uals have regarding us, would seem sure omens
of our doom. And at this unnerving juncture,
even some of us who discount the above view
are fearful of a backlash and pogrom.

Having no crystal ball, I don't know how
much of a witchhunt will ensue. Some degree
of it, such as the Dallas raid, has occurred al-
ready. More S & M or boy-trading mailing lists
are likely to be checked out. But certain obser-
vations can be made from our group experience
about the chances that a temporary hysteria
might so escalate as to cancel all our recent
progress.

Times have changed, even though a lot never

102

103

changes. The public today seems less easy to
whip into a frenzy than in the years of Mc-
Carthy's hunt for 'Communists and perverts/
In those days, every sex murder (they were as
frequent as now, and were mostly heterosexual)
led to local roundups of homosexuals — neither
the police, press, nor general public distin-
guished between different kinds of perverts.
For every little girl molested, press and pulpit
screamed, 'known homosexuals' were rounded
up, legislators enacted more sex-deviate control
laws, and the next 200 Gays arrested often
found the court offering them 'castration or 15
years.'

Until about 1957, youths accused of killing
older men could generally get off by claiming
to have resisted a sex advance; the press would
lionize the killer and pronounce the victm a
monster. Wayne Henley tried that kind of de-
fense in his first story to the police, but Hous-
ton police apparently don't but that kind of
crap anymore.

The reaction of the police to Henley's original
claim of "protecting his honor'' was the first clue
that the backlash which preoccupied writer Jim
Kepner might not manifest itself as it frequently has
in the past.

Moreover, in answer to the question as to whether
the Corll case reflected typical homosexual activity,
Houston Police Chief Herman Short replied that he
didn't see the typical homosexual — or even the typi-
cal child molester— as having anything in common
with mass murderer Dean Gorll.

104

* "There is a different between homosexual activi-
ties and this type Cf sadistic, vicious behavior,"
Short said. "Fortunately, everyone who is homosex^

? ually inclined is not this sadistic.

j "I think we would all agree that this isn't typical
of what we are accustomed to, or know about, as
homosexual activity. This is a sadistic, animalistic,
brutal type of behavior."

! Asked if Chief Short saw any tie-in between the

J Corll case and typical child molesting activities, the
police head replied, "I wouldn't be able to say
whether there's any tie-in or not. That becomes a
psychological and psychiatric evaluation type prob-
lem. Any sexual deviation, I suppose, in the case of
some people, could lead to all kinds of behavior."

"But so far as a tie-in, to say that everyone that
might be guilty of molesting a child would treat one
like this, I don't think would be right at ail/'

However, for all the good sense offered by Chief
Short, there was evidence that Jim Kepner's fear of
backlash was more than "crying wolf. While news
writers covering the Houston killings persisted in
peppering paragraph after paragraph with the ho-
mosexual implications of the case, editorial com-
ment, especially in Texas, was extraordinarily re-
strained. There were no mass indictments of
homosexuals in general, with the exception of con-
servative writer and columnist Jeffrey St. John who
took to the airways to outline his views in a broad-
cast of Spectrum on the CBS network.
The text of St. John's commentary follows:

"Homosexuality is an activity which does
nobody any harm," wrote the psychologist Wil-

I 105

helm Reich. "It's not a social crime."

This quack psychology has been brutally
challenged in the grisly horrors that have been
unfolding in Houston, Texas. So far, more than
twenty-five bodies of teenage boys have been
uncovered, the victims of torture and sexual
abuse allegedly by a 33-year-old homosexual
who murdered his prey and buried them in
plastic shrouds. Homicide is not the exclusive
province of the homosexual. However, the his-
tory of mass murders has consistently carried
with it overtones and undercurrents of sexual
aberration.

The Houston mass murders, however, help
illuminate for us a still murky landscape and
raise some disturbing questions. For example,
is there a causal relationship between the rise
in multiple murders and the decline in social
restraint seen in increased activity by violent
radical groups? We have seen how the accep-
tance of violence for political ends has lowered
ethical values and brought in its wake a corre-
sponding rise in violent crimes. The acceptance
of abortion by large segments of the educated
elite in America has further cheapened the
value of life itself.

In this degenerate nihilist climate, multiple
murders like the Los Angeles Manson affair
and now Houston are not at all surprising. One
cannot regard it as a coincidence that the
Houston murders began at the time gay mili-
tants took to the street in 1970, What the gay
liberation groups want is to legitimize a revolt
from male biology and reality itself. For in the

106

final analysis homosexuality is a profound psy-
chological confusion over sexual identity.

We seem to have forgotten that it was the
Nazi SA gangs, many of them sadistic homo-
sexuals, who brought Hitler to power, d and he
later refined the art of mass murder on a mon-
strous scale. It is now well documented that
one of the many reasons for the rise of Hitler
was the decline in social restraint and moral
and intellectual values in Germany in the
1920's.

It is significant, moreover, that William Bo-
litho in his classic on mass murder tells of a
homosexual murderer of teenage boys in Ger-
many in 1924, which has a frightening parallel
to Houston 1973.

If, therefore, we are horrified by Houston, we
should also be horrified by the grisly warning it
offers America.

In commenting on the St. John editorial newspa-
perman Carl King said "St. John offered nothing
that American homosexuals have not heard over and
over again. It is an old, tired record, replayed when-
ever a horrendous crime occurs involving minorities.
When the Manson killings were in the headlines
'long hairs' was the code word and automatically
fearful citizens were warned to look over their
shoulders and guard themselves against any ap-
proaching stranger who had not been to John Erlich-
man's barber. We have, in the last decade, been
aware of the impact of such code words as law and
order' for instance.

"What can be learned from the Houston tragedy is

107

that the energies of the homophile movement have
met with response. Whatever backlash against ho-
mosexuals grew out of it was minimal and personal.
Ministers did not hasten to their pulpits, the police
did not swoop down in the Southwest and padlock
all the gay bars and St. John judiciously eliminated
a key historical fact from his account of Hitler's
early power plays."

"Captain Ernst Roehm was the SA chieftain who
collected the rag-a-tag group of juvenile delinquents
who supported Hitler, among whom there were, in-
deed, many homosexuals. But once Hitler grabbed
power he swooped down to Munich one spring night
in 1934, caught them all in the sack; and machine-
gunned them to death. He personally attended to
the execution of Roehm."

"The anti- homosexual laws in Germany were
tightened and exist today— along with those in the
. United States and Soviet Russia, the only civilized
countries where oppressive moral laws have not yet
been wiped off the books."

Carl King, a former editor of Confidential, now
representing the European Syndicates, flew to Texas
from his London headquarters at the first flash of
hews about the Houston massacre. He remained
there for several weeks and found sparse evidence
that homosexuals in general were blamed for the
crime — St. James evidently represented a viewpoint
that failed to magnify into any discernible propor-
tions.

"Most people I talked to were frightened and
worried about their children. The feeling seemed to
be that if one monster like" Corll could roam the
streets freely for so many years despoiling their

youth, there must be others lurking in the shadows.
They were dismayed by the roles played by Henley
and Brooks and confessed to being unable to under-
stand them. They appeared so typical of the boys
">ne sees 'hanging around' these days — teenagers
able to find only occasional work, high school drop-
outs, not criminals in the ordinary sense, like mug-*
3 T ers and thieves. Their homosexuality was not at
.^ue;. rather, the brutality and sadism of their
.rimes.

"However, the sensitivity of Gays to the potential
of harassment is valid as their past history illus-
trates so dramatically. Homosexuals have systemat-
.caily been routed out of their homes in the middle

the night to answer line-ups whenever a sex crime
occured involving a child— this, in spite of the
snown and proved fact that the average homosexual

disinclined to attack juveniles. By far the largest
number of child molesters are attracted to little girls
but for them it is far easier to become lost in the he-
terosexual world than it is for the homosexual, some
of whom are easily recognizable."

"What the average person fails to understand is
that, until very recently, the homosexual lived in
what amounted to a virtual police state. Sex acts be-
tween males violate the law in most states, between
females in some states — even when they are consent-
ing adults. The penalities are enormous — ranging up
10 ninety years and life imprisonment."

■-Until ten or twelve years ago Gays lived furtive,
secret lives 'in the closet' as it has been described.
When they collected it was largely in gay bars which
existed at the pleasure of the police and were, more
often than not, managed by the Mob. Most of them

108

109

were dirty, dingy places with inflated prices and wa- 1
tered liquor. But it was either that or nothing."

The Mob paid the cops handsomely for protection,
but even this failed to eliminate all the dangers. It >
was common for vice squad officers to entrap cus-
tomers into what the law described as Vile, lewd
and lascivious conduct.' Morals arrests under such
conditions shattered more than a few lives thanks to
the permanence of a name on a police blotter. " J

"When election time came around, the gay bars of
any town were fair game. Often they were systemat-
ically raided and whole police vans of 'lewd and dan-
gerous 7 characters were hauled off to the pokey.
Hitler's Germany had very little on some of the in-
famous gay raids or record made in cities- like Los
Angeles and San Diego."

"Newspapers often participated, aware that;
there's ho surer circulation booster than a Vice raid'
and everyone in the political sector was enriched.
The going price for getting Gays out of a vice rap
ranged from a thousand to five thousand, depending
on what the individual traffic would bear. And it
was split percentage-wise among the arresting of-
ficers, the lawyer, prosecutor and the judge. There
was no magic formula involved, Anyone with the
money could arrange a fix, and the nearest patrol
car would supply you with the information as casu-
ally as he directed you to a highway."

"Some of this corruption has disappeared in the
wake of Gay Liberation and the realization of re-
sponsible men in the upper echelon of city and state
governments that legislating morals is an anachron-
ism in today's society— esp< ,ially in the face of the
vast increase in real crime. And they have discov-

110

ered the political clout possesed by Gays."

"What has evolved then in a number of America's
big cities is a grey legal state that satisfies no one.
Police no longer enforce the morals laws. In some
cities like New York entrapment has been outlawed
on the premises of gay establishments. But it can
occur on the streets and other public places. The
police still pack wallop and possess the capacity to
harass the homosexual for if one law is frowned upon
in court, there's always another to take its place."

"Intimidating homosexuals remains a lively game
in this country and it is liable to remain exactly that
in the foreseeable future, at least until the national
conscience is aroused to the point that blanket legis-
lation writes an end to the morals codes of individu-
al communities. The devotee of prurient literature
can find no more titillating reading than those mas-
terpieces of puritanism, the old-fashioned vice codes.
He might wonder, at the same time, at the mentali-
ty of the dirty old men who authored them."

"The reluctance to wipe them off the books by our
legislators has nothing to do with their zeal to pro-
tect public morality. They are out to fatten their
own pocketbooks. There's money in vice as every
politician knows,' from the cop on the beat to the
reformer who occupies the mayor's office or the Gov-
ernor's Mansion."

"No one has ever counted a typical year's take of
bribes to all the parties involved produced by main-
taining the old 'closet' atmosphere in which Gays
are forced to live. It must have amounted to millions
in big towns like New York, Chicago and Los Ange-
les. Buck-a-bottle beer paid off crooked police and
Mafia bar owners. Blackmail payments enriched

111

vice squad trappers. Trumped-up criminal charges
fattened the wallets of the legal profession, bail
bondsmen and judges.

"No 'one wants to see that gravy train derailed,
but eventually it is going to happen. The public isn't
as easily fooled as it used to be. It is beginning to
wonder at the validity of all that protection of our
morals. It is questioning police raids on gambling
dens, bookies, call girls, gay bars and the like when
cops can't catch a rapist or protect the streets from
muggers."

"Gay activists appear to fear most that so-called
silent majority of America, but it's my guess that
one day they're going to find the bulk of their sup-
port coming from that area. I think Fd offer the
Houston case as an example, the legal-mindedness
of the police, the absence of blood and thunder edi-
torials, the statement of police Chief Herman Short
and the indifference to the 'call-to-arms' by Mr. St.
John."

"Sexual morality isn't the big thing it used to be
and for that we can thank the younger generation.
Middle America has had to accept change— or lose
their kids completely. And once they take off their
dark glasses they discover that there's much more to
worry about in their troubled globe than how some-
one goes about the pleasures of making love,"

John C, is a detective who has worked on the po-
lice force of a larger Eastern city for a number of
years where he has guarded his homosexual privacy
with remarkable ease. "I simply never thought
about it," said John. "That was the attitude I as-

112

Wayne Henley, seventeen at the time, sits in a police cruiser
after tphing police that he had killed his friend, thirty-three
year old Dean Corll after a pot and orgy party at Cord's home.

Classmates at Vidor High School m Texas recall Dean Corli as
=. "nice guy." He played the trombone with the school band and
;ave no hint of the sadistic pervert who became a mass killer.

/'>/*'///',

Wooden box, above, and torture
board, below, were found in
Dean Corll's house. Police said
box was used to carry his
victims to various pjaces around
Houston where they buried
in shallow graves, their corpses
wrapped in plastic bags.

Parents of David
Helligeist hold
a handbill they
circulated in
vain after their
boy disappeared
The Heiiigeists * *
were critical of *
police action.

One of eight bodies found there is carried out of boat
house where Dean Corll and Wayne Henley had buried victims
The pitiful remains had been disintegrated by lime.

A Houston police detective continues digging after removing
the head of a young boy and placing it in a wheel barrow.
The head belonged to the tenth victim found in boat yard.

Mary Henley, the mother of Wayne, remained steadfast in he p
loyalty to her son, visiting him wnen authorities permitted
and writing the lean youth virtually every day she could.

This is Dean CorN's bedroom. The mask on the bed was used
by the sadistic killer for kicks. The mask, stuffed with poppers,
arovided stimulation over the hours Corll indulged his fantasies.

his graphic testimony relating to the torture instruments
and the uses to which they were put by Corll and Henley.

Houston Police Chief Herman Short talks to newsmen about ?m ^ : w ^

the problems his department faces in meeting the ever- Throughout his preliminary hearings and trials, Wayne Henley

increasing problem of runaways. It is national in scope. appeared unmoved and indifferent to the proceedings— acting

as though he were at a loss to understand why he was there.

David Brooks became Dean Corll's lover when he was only thi
teen. The youth's father brought him to the police station
after Henley's arrest to confess his role tn mass murders.

sumed at the very beginning, and it's worked out ex-
tremely well. My homosexuality and my work are
totally unrelated and I figured the burden of proving
otherwise lay with those great minds at the top who
consider a man's private life to be their business.

"They would probably be surprised if they knew
.how many homosexuals already exist in virtually
every large police department in the country. Or do
ihey really know? I suspect that they have a pretty
clear idea and wisely close their eyes to it because of
their awareness that some of the best men they have
are gays. -Most of their public posturing amounts to
just that — cries of outrage whenever the press gets
-around to suggesting that the police are being infil-
trated by 'long hairs,' 'homos,' 'radicals 7 and 'rebel-
lious minorities.'

"When the New York firemen took to the streets
recently to protest passage of a law guaranteeing
equal civil service employment rights to admitted
homosexuals, they appeared ludicrous, trying to
mouth specious arguments that morality at the sta-
tion house would be offended by the presence of
'perverts' and 'queers' in the cots next to them. On
one level, they seemed to give the impression that
their personal attractiveness would overwhelm gay
colleagues to the point of rape; on another, they dis-
played woeful fears concerning their own masculini-
ty. It would seem logical that any grown man at his
physical fitness peak, as a fireman is supposed to be,
ought to be able to handle a 'pass' regardless of
where it originated.

"What is regrettable about Gays vs. the Poliee is
that a valuable source of manpower is being lost,
even among the Gays,already serving in the depart-

113

ment. Sex murders haunt the gay community and in
an ever increasingly violent world they are becoming
more frequent, and at the same time, more violent
and sadistic. The papers are filled with stories of
murders .and assaults made by so-called gay-haters,
warped young hustlers, who hang out in places like
Greenwich Village where they pick up older men
who foolishly invite them to their homes, Gnce sex is
consummated their young friend turns into a mon-
strous fiend, usually, according to psychiatrists out
of his own shame, and becomes a murderer.

"Now, I don't maintain that a gay detective is the
only fellow who could solve a murder of that sort,
but he would certainly be better equipped to pick up
a trail than the cop who knows nothing of the life
style of the victim.

"Take a case like the Houston murders', for exam-
ple. As soon as I read that the Heights was known in
Houston's gay circles as Homo Heights I could imag-
ine the kind of police surveillance it might enjoy if
gay cops were allowed to operate within the range of
their own world.

"Hindsight is better than foresight, but a gay cop
patrolling the Heights would have developed an in-
sight into the way the young gays operated there. He
would know the street kids, have knowledge of the
hustlers, be able to watch the dangerous ones. And,
at the same time, protect the kids from someone like
Deari Corll.

"There was nothing mysterious about Dean Corll.
Any gay cop would automatically have had second
thoughts about a thirty- three-year old man who
dressed like a kid, dished out candy to kids and
carried a sofa around in the back of a delivery

114

wagon. That's definitely not normal behavior, espe-
cially when the youngsters he shows a decided pref-
erence for happen to be teenage boys, A cop should
look into something like that, and a gay detective
would know exactly where to look,

"He'd talk to some of the kids around Homo
Heights— and from the newspaper reports they al-
ready had a line on the score. Hadn't they told re-
porters that Corll avoided contact with chicks?

"The whole pattern of Corliss thirty years shows a
deeply disturbed, confused young man. He was a
mother's boy, too good to be true. That began it all.
There were no signs of normal rebellion against the,
restrictive small town society he lived in^Corll early
mastered the trick of conforming, and that just
doesn't jibe with young people's behavior today.
There had to be signs of revolt somewhere. All that
repression was bound to explode— and when it hap-
pened, we know the horrible results.

"From the gay investigator's viewpoint, every-
thing was suspicious about Corll. That he talked his
way out of the Air Force after ten months. The
number of times he moved, the fact that he lived in
apartments and then chose to accept the care of a ^
house, his father's. Bachelors who grow accustomed
to the comparative freedom of apartment house liv-
ing don't usually switch to houses— with all the
added burdens of lawn-mowing, maintenance and
the like.

"There had to be deeper reasons and, of course,
they became clear on the morning the police picked
up Wayne Henley for murdering Dean. These rea-
sons were his need for secrecy and his growing real-
ization that his impulses to kill were growing

115

stronger, more impossible to control. He was near
the end of his rope.

"The house served two functions. It produced the
added privacy he needed for his sexual outrages. On
the other hand, it gave him extra responsibility,
more work to do, something he believed would take
his mind away from his obsessions. The building
belonged to his father. That placed another respon-
sibility on him. Dean probably hoped against hope
that this sort of activity might help him — enable
him to blot out the horrors of the past and spare him
those of the future.

"This sort of information wouldn't have been
especially difficult to uncover and, in the hands of
someone who understood its significance, a way
could have Been found to detain Dean Corll -long,
enough for the psychiatrists to have had a crack at
him.

"They might have discovered what the gay writers
sensed immediately asthey covered the case for gay
publications, that Dean Corll was a 'closet queen,'—
a man so terrified of revealing his homosexual pro-
clivities that he even shunned the company of Gays.
It is commonplace for this type of personality to seek
out sexual contacts with the young and to pay for his
pleasures, since, under these conditions, there is less
risk of the rejection he fears as much as exposure.

"Society is filled with 'closet queens' and to active
Gays they're anathema. To themselves they are lon-
ely and bewildered. To their relatives and friends
they're a puzzle— tragic creatures who lead solitary
lives which often lead to tragedy. Scratch the sur-
face of a matricide and you'll often find a 'closet
queen/ They're also suicidal.

116

"The dark corners of men's minds are so mysteri-
ous that even when we shed a beam of light inside
we quickly turn it off because of ancient prejudices.
Take the Danish experiment with pornography, for
instance. They legalized it and the most immediate
■ and obvious result was a reduction in the number of
sex crimes. Reading sex books and looking at pic-
tures of the sex act evidently provided would-be ra-
pists with some means of gratification that satisfied
them.

"Gay Activists may seem far out— even to many
of their gay brothers, but so what? They're reaching
for freedom for themselves, the rights other people
take for granted, like the simple act of congregating
in a bar without paying tribute to the Mafia or risk-
: ing entrapment by the police. At the same time
they're talking to the 'closet queen'— twisted men
like Dean Corll, young, confused misfits like Wayne
Henley and David Brooks."

From the same issue of The Advocate which cov-
ered the Corll-Henley case so comprehensively, there
emerged another point of view, articulated in a let-
ter from a reader:

From Christopher Street until now, open
Gays have been preaching tolerance of every-
thing and philosophizing sex to the point of ab-
surdity. The Gay media has wrapped some
very good editorializing and news coverage
with a thick layer of sexual exploitation,

I leave it to your conclusion what kind of
image has been created when your pages are
filled with solicitations from sadists, inaso-
chists etc. Open Gays seem oblivious to the

117

fact that they have alienated the great majori-
ty of Gay people not engaged in activities or di-
alogues which insult Gays and non-Gays alike.
Most of us are whole human beings, not the
sex -crazed caricatures proclaimed by some.

The time of decision is here. Mature, prac-
tical rethinking is imperative. Professional help
should be given those in Gay society who are
mentally ill; but stop acting as if it didn't exist
or that any action by a Gay is to be condoned.

Organizations professing serious goals, such
as civil rights, should abandon the idea of
creating a so-called alternative to the bars* In
actuality, what has been done is that the atmo-
sphere of a bar has been transferred to the
movement. This kind of institutionalized cock-
tail party attracts mostly swingers looking for
action, instead of serious, dedicated people. It
is out of place to try and compete with bars of
entertainment by a group professing to be op-
pressed. The bar habitue is not the majority of
Gays, nor do they express a majority opinion —
hard to admit by some open Gays.

Put an immediate end to the blanket ap-
proval of all forms of sexual behavior. The im-
pression is strong that the movement and the
media representing Gay Americans approves
all and is oblivious to anything socially de-
structive. It can be and is argued that the gay
community is not unanimous in its attitudes
toward life.

This is not justification of certain destruc-
tive practices. Child molestation, sadism and
masochism are. repulsive and abhorren^to me

118

and the overwhelming majority of Gay people.
Silence will be interpreted as approval, and our
very existence will be at stake. It is tragic for
all that to some it is all fun and games.

From Christopher Street to Pasadena,
Texas, he's been there all along. In the back of
the mind. We said times are changing, things
are getting better. The ''movement" kept its
thin-skinned, exculpatory self busy educating
and perpetuating itself. Forget the excuses, for-
get hiding, forget Corona, Manson and other
heterosexuals of like notoriety. This one is
Gay!

Name withheld
Los Angeles, California

119

PART FIVE

Torture, Dominance and Murder

"People are like maggots, small, blind, worthless,
fish bait. Rape is not a crime* It is a state of mind.
Murder is a hobby and a supreme pleasure. " —
David Smith, testifying at England's infamous The
Murders of the Moors trial

In 1936 a young psychologist, Abraham Masiow,
Became fascinated with the behavior of the monkeys
in the Bronx Zoo in New York. They puzzled him
because, as monkey watchers always assumed, they
seemed to think of nothing but sex. "The screwing
went on all the time/* said Masiow. Being a Freu-
dian, he thought that made sense until he noticed
the frequency with which male monkeys mounted
male monkeys and females mounted other females.
There were even females who mounted the male
monkeys.

Masiow asked himself if it was true that monkeys
were simply oversexed because of being in captivity.
Then the answer struck him. It was always the high-
ly dominant apes that mounted the less dominant
ones, and it made no difference whether they were

123

male or female.

This piqued Maslow's interest in the whole phe-
nomenon of dominance and he decided to study
dominance in women — the naturally undominant
sex. He made careful studied of nearly two hundred
women and the results produced a startling new psy-
chological concept.

What was so remarkable was that the women
seemed to fall quite clearly into three groups which
Maslow labelled High Dominance, Medium Domi-
nance and Low Dominance,

High Dominance women tended to be highly
sexed, masturbating without guilt and even given to
lesbian experimentation. To achieve full sexual sat-
isfaction they sought a highly dominant male. Medi-
um dominance women tended to be gentle, looking
for marriage and a man wfio would give them the
protection of a home. Low dominance women did
not really care for sex at all, considering procreation
its chief function and considered the male organ
crude and ugly. High dominance women found it
beautiful.

In the sphere of crime, dominance based part-
nerships have been shown to be of a lethal and de-
structive nature. When a high dominance personali-
ty, with criminal tendencies, decides to form an
alliance with a medium dominance personality—
simply for the purpose of having a slave and disciple
—the results can be highly explosive. Crime is an in-
strument of asserting dominance and the submis-
siveness of the slave leads the Master to seek out
new ways of expressing his power. The history of
crime is full of these relationships between high and
medium dominance personalities.

124

The Manson case was a biaarre example of domi-
nance-murder. Charles Manson was thirty-three
when he arrived in San Francisco after spending most
of his life behind bars for an assortment of petty
crimes, The public impression of Charles Manson is
that of a demonic, Svengali-like figure with smoul-
dering eyes; in fact he attracted followers by his gen-
tleness, charm, and intelligence.

He preached a . "Superman" philosophy and the
disciples gathered around and listened. He spoke of
universal love and the innocence of the senses. The
impressionable young girls who hung on every word
heightened his delusions of grandeur. He wanted to
i>e somebody— a Bob Dylan perhaps, an Indian mys-
tic. But when it came to performing, singing, his
songs, making records, Manson (whose name meant
Man's Son to his: sycophants) the: self-styled genius
Hopped,

So from his frustrations there came talk of revolu-
tion,, the overthrow of society and a world without
his enemies, the "pigs" and "capitalists." It was
only a step to prove to himself that he was a man of
power and strength. So he ordered his followers to
commit murder and his victims included Sharon
Tate r the film star whose body was horribly mutilat-
ed in the torture killing spree. And there were others
—including pop musician Gary Hinman and the su-
permarket owner Leon Labianca and his wife.

In England they eailed i it the Murders of the
Moors, and in English crime annals it became the
korror of the century. The killers were 28-year-old
Ian Brady and his worshipping mistress-slave Myra
Bindley. They were accused of murdering three
young peoples-Edward Evans, a 17-year old homo-

125

sexual, Lesley Ann Downey, a child of ten and John
Kilbride, aged twelve. The sexually assaulted bodies
of John and Lesley were discovered by the Lan-
cashire police buried in shallow graves on the Sad-
dleworth Moor, near Manchester. Evans had been
found in a bedroom in Myra Hindley's house with
his head smashed in by an axe.

The killers made tape recordings of Lesley Dow-
ney pleading for her life. They photographed the
young victim naked with a scarf over her mouth,
posing obscenely in the vulgarly furnished bedroom.

Brady's brother-in-law, David Smith, asked to
help in the killing, was frozen by the horror of what
he saw. He testified, "My first thoughts were that
Ian had hold of a life-sized rag doll and was just
waving it about. Then it dawned on me that it was
not a rag doll. It was the lad, screaming and groan-
ing."

Brady had picked up Edward Evans at the Man-
chester railroad station buffet and brought him to
the shabby, little house he shared with Myra. The
lad, wearing tight-fitting blue jeans, probably ex-
pected sex — but met murder instead.

Continued David Smith, "There were a couple of
seconds of silence and the lad groaned again, only
very much lower. Ian lifted the axe way above his
head and brought it down again. The lad stopped
groaning then. He was making a gurgling noise like
when you brush your teeth and gargle with water.
Ian placed a cover over his head. He had a piece of
electric wire, and he wrapped it around the lad's
neck; and he was saying, 'yea* f . . . ing dirty bas-
tard, ' over and over again. The lad just stopped
making this noise, and Ian looked up and said to

126

Myra, 'That's it* It is the messiest yet.' "

After Smith left the witness stand, part of his
diary was entered into the transcript. It read: "Peo-
ple are like maggots, small, blind, worthless, fish
bait. Rape is not crime. It is a state of mind. Murder
is a hobby, and a supreme pleasure."

In the film, The Godfather, the members of the
Corleone family, when dispatching an enemy, ac-
complished it neatly and efficiently— with an air of
gTace about it. A reaMife underworld hit bears no re-
semblance to the movies, for hoods still show affec-
tion for 'the slow, painful style torture of killing in-
herited from their ancestors.

Murder is like an invisible shroud enveloping the
brothers of the Mafia in its cold, clammy folds.
From it, there is no escape, because murder is many
things. Murder is the cement that binds the organi-
zation together. Murder is vengeance for an injury.
Murder is the penalty for betrayal.

Historically, Mafia murders embrace many forms.
They are neither neat nor orderly for if there is time
there is also torture. How a victim is killed tells the
reason for the crime.

In Sicily centuries ago when a landowner com-
plained to his Mafia protectors that a peasant was
robbing him blind, the unlucky thief would be found
one morning riddled with bullets— his hands cut off.
In the Mafia's crude code of symbols, this was the
punishment dealt to thieves. If a tongue was cut out
and a cork stuffed in a victim's mouth this revealed
that he had violated bis vow of Omerta — never to
betray the society's secrets. Cut-off genitals stuffed

127

into the mouth meant that the murdered man had
"offended" someone's woman.

When the Mafia needed to obtain confessions they
used the "casetta torture."

The victim was laid on his back on a wooden case
about 3 feet long, 2 feet 6 inches wide and 1 foot 6
inches high. His dangling hands and feet were fas-
tened with wires to the sides of the case. The
wretched man was then drenched with brine and
whipped with a bull whip. In this way the lashes
were more painful but left no mark. Then his hair
and nails were torn out and the soles of his feet
burned. He was given electric shock, his genitals
were forcibly squeezed and every now and then a
funnel was stuck in his mouth. His nostrils were
pinched and he was made to swallow salt water until
his stomach swelled.

There were few men brave enough to resist this
kind of torture for very long. They always "con-
fessed."

The Mafia's inheritance from the past still per-
vades the world of its assassins,

William Jackson, for instance, was a 350-pound
enforcer for Mob shylocks, money lenders working
out of Chicago. A huge, sweating pig of a man, Jack-
son had a nickname, "Action," because he always
got results. When he was fingered as a canary who
had talked to federal authorities he got results of a
peculiar nature.

Usually the mob likes to keep its murders as dis- .
creet as possible. But not this one; "they wanted to
make an example of Action Jackson. Hence the de-
tails of what happened to him became widely
known.

128

First they took him to a cellar somewhere in Chi-
cago. Then they ripped off his clothes, slapped him
around a bit, then shot him in the knee for no par-
ticular reason. Then, warming to their work, they
got in licks with baseball bats, icepicks, feet and
fists. No doubt there was more than a little sexual
sadism involved because even by Mob standards
this set of killers went above and beyond the call of
duty.

Sweating hard, because of his enormous weight,
Jackson was hoisted onto a meat hook on the wall.
His torturers pushed him into the hook and he hung
there by his rectum. But this wasn't enough. They
took turns applying an electric cattle prod to Jack-
son's penis.

They kept playing with the penis, these "mascu-
line" Mafia hoods, and when they tired of it, they
burned it off with a blow torch. Later they worked
on other parts of Jackson's body, and when they
took him off the hook his bowels were pulled, out. It
took Jackson three days to die and when the police
found the body in the trunk of his own Cadillac— it
was really only a "thing" — it didn't look like much
: of a man.

The facts of this macabre handiwork were con-
firmed by conversation which had been picked up on
a police wiretap. The assassins were James Torello
and Fiore Buccieri, soldiers in the Chicago mob of
Sam Giancana.

TORELLO: Jackson was hung up on that meat
hook. He was so fucking heavy he bent itv. He
was on that thing three days before he croaked.
BUCCIERI: (Giggling) Jackie, you shoulda

129

seen the guy. Like an elephant he was and
when Jimmy hit him in the balls with that
electric prod. ...

TORELLO: He was flopping around on that
hook, Jackie. We'd toss water at him to give
the prod a better charge and he's scream-
in'.,..

Ernie "The Hawk" Rupolo was a Mafia stool pi-
geon. He had betrayed the infamous Vito Genovese,
a ruthless, calculating unforgiving hood who rose
from the ranks to become the underworld's most
feared Boss of all the Bosses.

It took years before Vito gained his revenge on
Rupolo for implicating him in a murder. But it hap-
pened—even though Genovese himself was in jail at
the time. His boys on the outside took care of the job
for him.

First, Ernie "The Hawk" disappeared. He'd been
released from prison on the promise of the New York
District Attorney that he would be given his freedom
in exchange for his testimony against Genovese.
When the authorities released him they warned Ru-
polo he was signing his own death warrant.

The gangster knew it, but he believed he could
survive. He had friends. At least that's what he
thought.

So he began breathing the air of freedom — moving
from place to place, never steeping in the same bed
more than two nights in a row. He begged a few pen-
nies to live on from his friends and -from his rela-
tives. The Hawk knew he was a marked man, that
any day might be the last of his life.

130

Then he was seen no more. His friends began to
%-onder. There was no one to ask. Not the Mob. Not
:he police. They would hear from them soon enough.

Ernie had been missing about three weeks when
lis body surfaced in Jamaica Bay on' a Queens
County Beach on August 27, 1964. His tightly bound
corpse had broken loose from some concrete weights
and was taken to the New York City morgue where a
iiedical examiner dictated his findings:

The body is that of a middle-aged white man,
5'9 n tall There is a heavy rope ligature looped
around the neck. The wrists are tied together
with an intricate series of turns of a yellow
woven plastic cord which encircles the ab-
domen. To one end of this was tied two con-
crete blocks, tied together with heavy rope and
\, yellow cord and chain.

The yellow cord is tied around the right shoe
and ankle . . . there are also several loops of
heavy chain .'. . on removing the shoes and
socks, the epidermis of the feet, which is mac- •
erated, comes away from the socks ...

Examination of the head discloses consider-
able maceration and separation and loss of the
skin of the nose, with fractures of the nasal
bones. The right eyeball is absent and the
socket is scarred . . . there is also a bullet
perforation with macerated edges on the ar-
terior surface of the neck below the chin on the
left side.

In addition to the bullet tracks, there are
multiple stab wounds, seven on the left an-
terior surface of the chest and four on the right
Two of the four wounds on the right penetrate

131

the chest. . .

On the. left lateral surface of the chest there
are seven more stab wounds. These are up to
six inches in depth. . ,

Cause of death: bullet wounds of head,
brain, neck and spine. Multiple stab wounds of
the chest, lungs, heart and abdomen. Homici-
dal.

Newspapers reported that the bloated, unsightly,
horrid-smelling corpse was Ernest "The Hawk" Ru-
polo, once a skilled hit man for Murder, Inc.

His brother, Willie, a bookie, made the identifica
tion, but not from looking at the "thing" which lay
on the marble slab in the morgue. He was able to
make positive identification through recalling that
Ernie still carried a bullet in his body that had never
been removed and that there was a mesh screen in
his stomach put there after a hernia operation. Wil-
lie also knew the body was his brother from the
shoes he wore and the broken zipper on his pants.
Without these clues positive identification would
never have been possible.

You don't have to dip into the shadowy world of !
the Mafia to discover bizarre torture slayings. There :
was Harvey Glatman, for instance, who died in the
gas chamber at San Quentin, He had been executed
for kidnapping and torturing women. He enjoyed
photographing them in captive positions. When he
was uncovered and arrested, police found thousands
of dollars worth of pornographic pictures in his
home. He specialized in collecting pictures of women
in black lingerie bound in ropes and chains.
Glatman would dash to the television set with his

132

camera and shoot a picture of the screen whenever a
niovie would show a woman bound. When he was
Mill a small boy, he was discovered in his room with
a heavy cord tied around his penis to a dresser, lean-
ing back, groaning in pain and ecstasy. •

Only a few years ago, one of America's most re-
spected actors was found dead in his Hollywood
apartment, dressed in women's clothes, his body
manacled and tied up. He killed himself by hanging.
• For years he had kept his strange aberration a
secret; not even his friends were aware of his furtive
dedication to cross-dressing and macabre sadomaso-
chistic rites.

Just a few weeks before the Houston murders
struck the headlines, another case suggesting over-
—t^s of sadomasochism came out of Miami, giving
rise to the very real speculation that some sort of ep-
idemic had broken out, the outgrowth of the current
fad for S & M sexual games and exploration. Devel-
opments in the investigation revealed, however, that

involved an obsessive killer with a long patholog-
ical history.

He was 43-year old Albert Brust, a husky former
seaman and ex-convict whose had committed sui-
zi'ie by drinking a tumbler of chocolate milk laced
■xith cyanide. Police found his body stretched out in
5. lawn chair after neighbors had complained of a
strange odor, suggesting a decomposing body, that
emanated from Brust's house.

The final days of the man's life had been a horri-
replay of torture and a longing for sex that evi-
nerr.ly had plagued him for most of his life. It began

133

when he picked up 16-year-old Mark Bernard Mat-
son and a 15-year old girl police named "Mary
Ellen" to protect her true identity. Brust was driv-
ing a recently acquired car around Ford Lauderdale
when he saw the two young people and prevailed
upon them to accompany him to Miami. Both were
several states away from home and "Mary Ellen," at
least, was identified as a runaway.

He was able to lure them into accepting the ride
by telling them there was some work around the
house which needed doing and that he would pay
them.

When they got to the house, Brust took the young
people into a bedroom wnich he had converted into
a torture chamber and forced both of them into per-
forming acts of fellatio and cunnilingus while he
took photographs.

Matson found an opportunity to jump Brust, but
it was a tragic mistake. Brust was armed. He fired
three shots into the boy's body, killing him instant-
ly. He dragged him into a spare bathroom, cut off
his hands, feet and head and buried him under the
concrete in a shower stall. His sexual organs, howev-
er, were not mutilated.

"Mary Ellen" was handcuffed in the torture
chamber for nearly twenty-four hours while Brust
raped her repeatedly. The psychopath did not use
any torture devices on her.

Finally he told her, "I have taken a life, so now
I'm going to give one back." Brust drove the girl
back to Fort Lauderdale and released her. She im-
mediately went to the police and told her story, but
the police were skeptical, an opinion that was rein-
forced when, on calling the girl V mother, they were

134

uold she was a "pathological liar." The authorities
presumed she had made up the story to create an ex-
cuse for being missing from home.

When police searched Brust's neat brick home
:hey found, besides the torture chamber, a diary
which shed some light on the man's warped predi-
lections and led to surmise that he may have been
involved in a number of other sex and murder
: crimes along the eastern ' coast. Investigation re-
vealed that Brust enjoyed a good reputation in the
neighborhood to which he had moved in recent
years, although one or two young men maintained
Brust had made "passes" at them. A shop owner
who knew him fairly well identified Brust as a "bi-
sexual who hung out with Gays."

The dead man's diary revealed that he had bought
the house the year before his death and promptly
^ent to work building the torture chamber. His
diary said, "no sex yet," indicating that the two Fort
Lauderdale hitchhikers had been his first victims.

The diary, begun in 1970, reflects a constant
yearning for death, never fully explained. It refers
constantly to events of "August and September
1968" which led to a nearly successful suicide at-
tempt, but the diary never explains them.

The diary revealed that Brust was sentenced to
prison in New York, in 1951 on charges of kidnap, as-
sault, robbery and grand larceny. He was paroled in
1957.

In his writing Brust revealed an almost masochis-
tic urge to return to prison. He appears to have been
afraid of age and ill-health. On his fortieth brithday
he wrote:

"I notice that my memory and thinking power has

135

deteriorated in the last two years . . . I fear insanity,
I fear prison. I fear the loss of my intellectual and
sexual powers, and I fear death. But of them all, I
fear death the least. I don't want to be an old fool, a
doddering wreck of feeble powers, a remnant of the
Brust that rebelled and won a round against this
stupid society. You might say that I wanted to die
with my intellectual boots on."

In his fear of growing old, there emerges a striking
parallel with Dean Corll, who went to such enor-.
mous lengths to appear youthful, even when his
short-cropped hair and young clothes made him ap-
pear ludicrous.

Further into his diary Brust wrote: "I note how
much Factually enjoy the solitude the last few years
—even more than I did in prison. After work I
always get home, as soon as possible to enjoy my soli-
tary sanctuary and its music and books and TV. No
sex yet, but I'm working on it— slowly but with de-
termined resolve. 1 know what I want. I need some-
one for sex, yes, but not an idiot I have to cater to."

The Leopold and Loeb case in 1924, the "super-
man murder" in which the two young Chicago stu-
dents, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, went out
and killed 14-year old Bobbie Frank for "kicks" was
labelled "the crime of the century" at the time. The
case was unique and without apparent motive. The
killers came from wealthy families and had no obvi-
ous reasons for frustration.

But, seen in the light of Loeb's dominance over his
more intellectual but less preposessing partner, the
crime—and its motive — becomes easier to compre-

136

bend. Curiosity, the desire for "thrills" and the need
to prove themselves "better" and "less bourgeois"
than their friends and relatives drove them to
murder.

Loeb had gotten it into his head thai he could
commit the perfect crime, which should involve kid-
napping* murder and ransom. He had unfolded his
scheme to Leopold because he needed someone to
help him plan and carry it out. For the plot Leopold
had no liking whatever, but he had a worshipping
opinion of Loeb.

Theirs was the perfect master-slave relationship.
Leopold was undersized; he could not excel in games
and sports. "Dickie" Loeb became his idol. He was
"ailer,- strong and athletic, good-looking. He was
good at football and baseball, hence extremely pop-
ular oh campus. Leopold was satisfied just to be able
10 bask in the shadow of his companionship and
&hen it became intimate, his delight in his friend
was limitless. There were no ends to which Nathan
wouldn't go to insure the permanence of the rela-
tionship — even to murder.

Both boys had money. Loeb had a couple of thou-
sand dollars in cash at, the time of the kidnapping as
well as a substantial amount of government bonds
on hand. Both enjoyed liberal allowances from their
parents and were always able to draw additional
funds when they needed them.

Often there was friction between the two boys
about their plan. Correspondence between them,
published in the press, showed that dissatisfactions
reached the point where there was almost a breach
in the friendship. But Leopold invariably made eon-
cessions to his dominant partner.

137

Clarence Darrow, the great criminal lawyer, was
retained to defend the youthful killers and the case ,
made history because Darrow threw them on the
mercy of the judge, pleading the youths guilty and
then seeking to prove that their diminished mental
processes should enable them to escape execution.
Darrow succeeded. They were sentenced to life im-
prisonment; Loeb was slashed to death by another
inmate in a shower stall after supposedly making a
homosexual advance. Leopold was paroled in the
sixties and died in service to mankind, as a hospital
worker,

Darrow placed on the stand ten to fifteen wit-
nesses including many schoolmates of the two boys
who testified to their bizarre actions and their belief
that neither of them was normal. An alienist tried to
explain their "Superman" philosophy and concluded
they were decidedly deficient in emotions, as shown
by physical tests.

Emotions, the alienist pointed out, were needed to
keep people from the commission of unusual acts.
He said, "To one in the possession of normal emo-
tional structure, the thought of any act seriously for-
bidden by custom, law or normal feelings is auto-
matically and immediately - revolting. No such
revulsion comes to someone with a defective nervous
system. These boys carried the fantasies of child-
hood into later youth. Both are incipient paranoiacs.
No one with a sane mind could commit such a mo-
tiveless deed."

Without Loeb's nagging, jeering and ever-present
"superiority" over him it is doubtful if Leopold
would ever have been anything more dangerous than
a scholar too bright and insufficiently creative , for

138

Ms own-^and other people's — good. The yearning to:
set in a criminal way would have been there, but he
snuld never have acted alone.

Perhaps the most important discovery about
ffiimi nance was not that it was made by a single psy-
chologist or naturalist; it has simply emerged quiet-
ly, until it is now generally recognized and accepted.

Among all animal groups, the number of highly
dominant creatures seems to be the same, an average
cf five percent.

Sir Henry Stanley, the explorer, knew about it
itji understood it as far back as the turn of the cen-
Kay. When George Bernard Shaw asked him how
many men could lead his party, if he became ill,
Stanley replied, "One in twenty." When Shaw asked
j£ this was exact or approximate, Stanley replied,
"Exact." He was referring to the will to power, to
dominate, to succeed, a theory which tallied with
Shaw's own conception of the Life Force; the inner
irive which leads the more dominant among us to
success in our jobs and professions.

Robert Ardrey, author of African Genesis, demon-
strated the "one in twenty" theory when his research
turned up one of the most closely guarded secrets of
the Korean War.

No escapes were made by American prisoners,
This was because the Chinese captors knew an in-
!"'*JHble method of preventing breakouts.They ob-
served the prisoners carefully for a while, then re-
moved the dominant ones — the five percent who
represented the "leader" figures. The other prisoners
ihen became much easier to handle.

The Nazis recognized the significance of this
rhen, during World War II, they placed all the most

139

incorrigible prisoners-of-war together in "escape-
proof* prisons. Many prisons now keep their most
dangerous criminals together.

From youth Dean Corll established himself as a
dominant personality. He knew how to play on his
mother's susceptibility and carefully cultivated her
dependence on him. No child becomes a "mama's
boy" by accident. It begins when a child realizes his
own power. And that comes very early in a baby's
experience, when his instincts are preparing him for
the intelligence he will eventually develop.

Dean showed his astuteness by maintaining a
close relationship with his father while discouraging
involvement with his stepfathers, men who usurped
his primary position with his mother and who were
often critical of his behavior. They were the people
who initially suspected his homosexuality and to
keep his secret, young Corll posed a threat to his
mother. Forced to choose between her son and hus-
band of the moment, she invariably turned her af-
fections toward Dean.

The business of Dean Corll's heart murmur re-
mains something of a mystery. Did it really exist or
had the child succeeded in fooling a doctor? It
wouldn't have been the first time.

In dealing with the problem of school athletics
Corll was obliged to resort to strategy. He'd shown
leadership qualities by assembling the neighborhood
kids into the kind of expeditions he liked— hunting
snakes and picking nuts for his mother's candy busi-
ness. Reasonably, he might be expected to show the
same leadership qualities on the sport field. Know-
ing he couldn't— that his effeminacy might interfere.

140

Dean leaned on the heart condition to extricate him*
self from that dilemma.

Corll, Like any leader, placed a value on rela-
tionships — hence his willingness to go live with his
grandmother when she needed him. His astuteness
in staying on the good side of his father had paid off
in many positive ways, and having his grandmother
as an ally might one day prove valuable.

Over and over again Dean used the tricks of chan-
neling his aggressiveness. He understood the subtle-
lies involved in achieving domination, over people.
He was a good conversationalist and could talk his
way in and out of situations at will. There was.noth-
Lng of the slouch about Dean Corll. He was smart,
determined to get his own way, quick at improvisa-
tion, ready to meet situations head-on.

In the absence of corroborative evidence we have
to surmise that the first threat to Dean Corll's role of
dominating leader occurred when he found out he
was sexually inadequate^ For- his sex life to have
taken the course that it did he had to be sexually
disabled, and some clues probably will be revealed
as psychiatrists probe the minds of David Brooks
and Wayne Henley. But by the yardstick of the case
histories of other mad sex killers, Corll's behavior
was consistent with most studies of men possessed of
powerful urges toward young people.

Corll was not a true pedophile* Unlike the true
pedophile, he preferred teenagers to the very young
and Dr. Larark noted, "Sexual motivation is at the
basis of every mass murder that has been studied
thoroughly. More often than not it is heterosexual in
its manifestation. And even then the killer's percep-
tion can be blurred. There have been numerous

141

cases of heterosexual child molester- murderers who
selected boys as occasional victims.

"One myth that does not hold true and is revived
whenever a case like the Corll-Henley murders sur-
faces is that homosexuals generally are stimulated
by children. This is not the case and the child mo-
lester is frequently a heterosexual who is indifferent
about the sex of his young victims. It is a dark,
murky field and it is very difficult to come up with
answers,"

"Child molesters follow no rigid pattern, belong to
no particular strata of society. They are found
among millionaires and in the ranks of illiterate,
unskilled workers. Statistics are valueless because
reported cases of child ' molesting represent only a
fraction of the total. Most often, child molestation
takes place within the family circle, among intimate
friends. No one brings charges under circumstances
like that."

"Corll has to be regarded as simply a fiend — a
man who probably suffered from an illness which
became progressively worse ,as his lust for killing
increased." ■

Few intimate details of their tangled sex lives
were to be found in the statements made by David
Brooks and Wayne Henley to the police. A great
deal of evidence supports the belief that theirs was a
Master-slave relationship in which Corli functioned
as the dominant figure, the key strategist who en-
joyed the thrill of the chase as well as the element of
surprise when his vassals produced their new vic-
tims.

The scenario appears to have followed a fixed pat-
tern. The hosts at the "parties" proceeded to reduce

142

themselves and their victims to an alcohol or drug-
educed state of euphoria where they dropped all
inhibitions and entered into the sex play tingling
with excitement. Corll got pleasure from watching
Ms victims chained; taping their mouths was proba-
bly a concession to the neighbors. Hearing them
scream might have added a special kick to his sadis-
tic impulses. Whips were used, hence the plastic
■covering for the floor, intended to protect the carpet
from being soaked with blood.

The sadists, if anything, were neat and tidy.. Had
Corli not moved so frequently he might have gotten
around to creating a "playroom" especially designed

suit his tastes— one with thick walls, sound proof -
Jig. torture racks and cases displaying his torture
-Equipment — handcuffs, chains, nylon web straps,
■$.£>£ collars, leashes, etc. Corll, however, did not ap-
pear to be "theatrical" in his passions — he was satis-
fed with commonplace equipment. He obtained his
straps from the supply available at his work, and his
■only concession to drama appears to have been the
medieval-type "torture mask" which he probably
picked up from a mail-order catalogue.

There was nothing sophisticated about Corll or his
disciples. The pleasure they derived from their exer-
cise in pain and humiliation must have been superfi-
cial and animalistic. They looked for sudden release
from their passions; having satisfied them, the final
act of murder was quick, furtive, fumbling.

From Wayne Henley's conversations with police
md newspapermen, he revealed himself, as inarticu-
late and embarrassed when it cam6 to dealing with
**ex. Me was very much the shy teen-ager, the pious,
feible-student-churehgoer who couldn't bring himself

143

to the use of four letter words, yet was incapable of
describing sex activity without them. He recoiled at
questions pertaining to the specifics inside the tor-
ture house as though they were too horrible to be
recalled. Yet, according to Brooks, in the frenzy of
the excitement produced by drugs and the physical
stimulation provided by the boys, Wayne was as
brutal in the sex act as Corll.

In Brooks and Henley, Dean Corll had found the
ideal slaves. He was believed to have known David
since trie boy was ten and Henley was drawn into his
orbit at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Both boys were
the products of broken homes and in search of a fa-
ther figure. This was the role Dean Corll knew very
well and could assume on demand.

Moreover, by acting out his delusions of youth he
could reach them on their own level. Their interests
were his. It was the same technique he used when he
was the Candy Man, luring young boys to the back
of his van where he kept a couch ready to accommo-
date his sexual appetite. He always had presents for
the" kids. A lot of the boys around the Heights had
worked for him at one time or another.

Henley arid Brooks, of course, had gotten beyond
the age where they could be bought for a few sticks
of candy. Wayne told the police that Corll used to
pay him five dollars, sometimes ten, to commit oral
copulation or anal sodomy with him. When he prom-
ised him two hundred dollars if he would procure
other boys for him, Wayne said he rejected the idea.
"But two years later I needed the money so I started
picking up kids for him." As an after-thought
Wayne toid reporters to warn children against hitch-
hiking, saying he picked up many victims that way.

144

The boys were constantly in need of money;
Wayne for his family,- David, just to get by. Wayne
fed earned the money to pay for one of his mother's
divorces. David's marriage created a new set of
problems. But Dean Corll had tittle beyond his sala-
ds - , so there was more to the relationship than the
small change they picked up.

What we find is a picture of two boys hopelessly
caught up in a series of horrendous crimes and a life
bcund to someone they failed to recognize as insane.
That they ever questioned their own mental stability
appears -doubtful. For it is here that comparison be-
ssteen the Houston trio and the Chicago duo, Loeb
&nd Leopold, asserts itself.

Wayne told the authorities that Dean spent hours
with his boys planning their cruising adventures.
This appeared to have delighted him. Dickie Loeb
tos the mastermind of the Bobbie Frank killing, a
youth who had gleaned his plan for the "Perfect
Crime" from extensive reading of detective maga-.
lines. It was he who worked out the details and
miked over the planning of the caper endlessly with
Leopold.

Leopold worshipped Dickie Loeb. Brooks' attorney
said that David thought Corll was the "kindest,
most compassionate, most brilliant person he had
aver met and could do no wrong." Brooks, it was stat-
ed, failed to understand why he had been locked up.
He kept asking his father "Why are they keeping me
here?"

Like Loeb and Leopold, the young killers were to-
tally without conscience, Henley once asked his
Sailers why they didn't find the rest of the bodies so
he could make bond and go home.

145

It could have been an act and some of the police
who guarded the youths at the time the bodies were
being uncovered insisted that it was. "They got
kicks from what they did. - They're not stupid;
they're foxy kids."

CorH's hold on the two boys evidently tied them to
him even in death. They still cared for him. The as-
tonishing thing was the ease with which CorlFs pos-
sessiveness had been maintained. Brooks clearly had
completely involved his life with CorH's. Even after
his marriage he could notr break the tie. Henley -was
the more independent of the two but repeated flaps
between them were always mended and he returned
to the house on Lamar Drive.

Neither ever showed a disinclination to act out
Corll's pattern of living—even if Brooks claimed
that he never participated in the actual killing of a
victim. He had not drawn the line at helping Corl!
bury the boys.

Brooks and Henley were completely subservient to
the wishes of Dean Corll. They never questioned his
orders. They simply carried them out.

Theirs was the ultimate slave-master relationship,
the unquestioning obedience of the two boys serving
to feed the warped mind of Dean Corll, driving him
on in his quest for new "thrills, new excitement."

The Advocate, in devoting what amounted to vir-
tually a full issue of comprehensive coverage of the
Houston Mass Murders, drew attention to the sado-
masochism games that have become a major fad in
the gay subculture of large cities over the last couple
of years. Reported the publication; "S & M devo-

146

&ses . . . insist that no sane S & M follower would
assort to murder or actual mutilation. They say
Carll was a psychopath,"

"But is the distinction these spokesmen are trying
^ make real or artificial? Are there two separate
srd distinct phenomena here, or is there a roadway
K£ which it is possible to travel from a relatively
^ell-lighted area into a dark and eerie landscape
zeiore one realizes where he is?"

The average persons knowledge of S & M could
&t engraved on the head of a pin with room to spare,
ifc may have heard something of the old British
«hool tradition of "birching boys" or that the whip-
sing of sailors "before the mast" was performed at
±je sadistic pleasure of old sea salts like Captain
Sklgh. And he might shudder at the veiled -insinua-
3CB in the obituary of a bright and promising young
British playwright that death occurred from a vio-
&nr sex encounter that went astray, that the vic-
m's body was found tied and bound by his own
ea:her belt. ^

This naivete reflects society's characteristic habit
: -weeping anything it considers distasteful or can-
xt grasp instantly under the carpet. Surrounded as
ife are by violence, reading as we do daily news
varies of sex killings, mass murders, homicides, sa-
distic knifings, this ostrich-like approach is as
unrealistic as it is impractical. Ignoring the disagree-
able does not make it go away.

In their zeal to label the Corll-Henley murders as
i "homosexual manifestation of the S & M subcul-
~ure ,f the media subscribed to a highly debatable
i^vpoint.

Representing agreement there was Dr. Charles

147

Wahy, UCLA psychiatrist who told The Advocate:
"There are sadistic persons who derive intense plea
sure not only from inflicting pain, but inflicting it on
an unwilling subject, and indeed killing that sub-
ject, or maiming that subject."

The professor based his observations on bis work
with patients, both homosexual and heterosexual,
who were in the S & M scene over a twenty yeai
period.

He said "I realize that sadomasochistic rela-
tionships exist when there is an interaction^the
times in which it is a mutual contract that's done
among persons who, I presume, trust one another
and who are not so intensively involved in the pa-
thology of sadomasochism."

"We see a lot of patients," Dr. Wahl told the Los
Angeles Herald-Examiner, "who are participating in
homosexual and sadomasochistic activities, and
they should realize that they run a substantial risk
that the person practicing the sadism is not able to
control himself."

"Mass murder is almost totally based on sexual
conflict of one type or another."

Larry Townsend, with a Master's degree in psy-
chology, is recognized as an expert on the modern
world of S & M and his Leatherman's Handbook is
exactly what the title implies— a definitive explora-
tion x>f the gay S & M leather scene from someone
who knows it from the inside. Its blurb defines the
work as "an intimate account of in -group customs
and mores, an appraisal of the S & M personality,
both in the back room and in the social world of
leather."

In the first chapter titled Why Leathersex, Town-

148

•send writes: "While our present day practitioners
poove most strongly on black leather, motorcycles
«d the attendant products of modern technology*
tiiere were many ancients who practiced ari earlier
r^m of their art with whatever materials were avail-
able during their particular lifetime."

"Binding a captive on the battlefield and claiming
him as one's property — sexual or otherwise — was
e&mmon enough in most early civilizations. The
Spartans had their helots and the Persians kept
slave harems of boys as well as girls. It is hard to
imagine that all these prisoners fulfilled every com-
mand of their masters without some form of coer-
cion. Nor can we discount the possibility that a
number of these masters simply enjoyed the use of
ilbeir slaves in some form of bondage. Here and there
to find a broken pot or dilapidated wall painting
■srhich depicts a captive warrior in sexual subservi-
gace. Slave markets flourished all over the Mediter-
ranean area, at one time or another, and it is titillat-
ing to think of * . . to envy, perhaps, the wealthy
Ionian or Carthaginian who had only to summon
Ms muscular litter-bearers and to be carried to the
mwn plaza to buy whatever tempting young boy
suited his fancy."

"Imagine being able to drive into Times Square or
Hollywood-and-Vine— or to some place along Mar-
ket Street— and buy that rugged number, bring him
home in chains and own him forever."

In describing the S & M relationship Townsend
3iT0te T "There is a good deal more involved than the
physical abuse of one person by another. The sadist
t? never going to derive the full pleasure he is seek-
ing unless he provokes an appropriate response from

149

his subject.

"In other words, the S & M exchange is just thaf
— ^an exchange basically seeking the same sensual
experience as any other interaction, if the masochisi
is to be subjected to pain, it is only with his express
or implied consent."

"If this scene is carried beyond the limits of tht
masochist it becomes quite a different thing. Those
outside the 'leather' circle may not understand whj
such a relationship can come into being, or how il
can be enjoyable; but they should realize that it is in
no way lethal."

"One must temper one's own needs to align them
with those of the partner. It goes far beyond tying a
guy down and whipping the shit out of him. It is am
exchange wherein each partner expresses his most
deeply guarded urges, and where those concealed
portions of his personality become the dominant mo-
tivations."

In respect to the Houston Massacre, Townsend
noted: "People who are able to express their sexuali-
ty, to act out their desires in a nondestructive ex-
change, are the least likely to commit this sort of
crime."

"Even if the components for violence lie within
them, the very act of sex tends to become the 'safety
valve/ permitting the steam of passion to escape
before it causes an explosion."

"It would be my opinion that these dreadful, vio-
lent crimes have come into being as the result of in-
dividuals who were unable to find socially accept-
able outlets for their sexual urgings* With society's
cap screwed down so tightly, we can expect that the
weakest will sometimes explode."

150

- ipporting Townsend's view that the sadist
"ce-ates within the limits set by his subject, Newt
T^rer, a Los Angeles psychiatrist with a doctorate

'\"m. clinical psychology, said: "The first thing we
^ mast look at is that Dean Corll was a sexual psycho-
gmh. The particular direction of the psychopatho-
^ £- was toward boys between the ages of 13 and 19,
*r>:n what we know right now."

~~ could just as easily have been directed toward
t &rls at that age, to prepubescent girls, or to ani-
r - This is a recognizable pattern of deviancy that
; specifically 'homosexual' or 'gay' as such,"
l In the case of an S & M transaction, whether it is
: non-gay, first of all the masochist really at all
z. := controls the transaction through signals —
_r~-ri upon by code words — to indicate that his
have been reached or surpassed. The sadist
s Ived in the game will respect these limits." ,
Said Dr. Charles Lamark, "Nothing we have
gamed about the case so far suggests that Dean

- was involved in an S & M scene. Certainly not
n :e 'game sense' practiced by the leathermen. I'd

H^gest that he stumbled upon his affinity for in--
vlu T ing pain by accident, as most psychopaths do.
faring inept sexually, the first thing that stimulated
■_■ physically he seized upon, regardless of how
_ -jgeous or excessive it was,"
"1: isn't exactly uncommon for an older man to
his libido restored by activity with a young
r — rin. Corll was far from senile, but it required
and an act of rape and torture to stimulate his
s*x impulses. A rational man, faced with this diiem-
r . ivould have consulted a psychiatrist."

y?\\ didn't, of course. And after his first killing,

151

when he found himself tingling with excitement,
thrilled by the sweat of his palms, the chills of his
body, perhaps an orgasm, he had stumbled ontr
something even more tempting. And it was at this
point that he stepped beyond the range of simple
molester to sex killer/'

, "Protracted exposure and practice of far-out sex i=
addictive and, consequently, dangerous. A man can
reach a point where sex without the desired fetish is
impossible."

"The cure is a difficult one, even for those with fe-
tishes not considered extreme, the discipline 'games'
of S & M, for instance. It amounts to abstaining
from whatever sex fetish gives them pleasure. Ob-
taining similarly inclined partners is not always that
simple."

"And it is here that we begin to follow the
Dean CorH's tragic journey into a world his intellect
had never equipped , him to understand. The ilrsr
hoy, the first murder—they sealed his own doom bur
before death took him out of his own private hell
more than a score of innocent victims lay in th*
morgue, waiting for their pitiful remains to be iden-
tified."

"It is so easy for society to mutter afterward thai
such a monster should have been killed or put awa>
before he did all that harm,. But who was there to
recognize his perversions? No one. The sexual psy-
chopath assumes virtually every human form there
is, including that of the Candy Man. "

Dr, Lamark added, "Corll adjusted to life by a
permanent regression to the infant level. He acted
this out in his choice of companions, his style of sex-
uality, and his violence.

152

"As long as he confined his social world to one
peopled by teenagers whom he supported and con-
trolled, he was emotionally free of the cares and
Katies of the adult world.

Like a six -year old on a playground, he was not
T -xare of the difference-between a male and a female
wdy, and, in the absence of a firm restraining hand,
tshere was no reason why he sould not chop up his
playmates. We often overlook the fact that Peter
Pen can be a dangerous man."

153

PART SIX

Town Criers Of Death

4 J don't know- where we are going to ge t a change of
^mue—to Canada—to London? "^Assistant Bi&
~t Attorney, Houston. , '

if ever a murderer was tried and convicted in the
-press and behind the soundproof walls of a police
nation interrogation center, he was Wayne Hesley;

But how could it have been otherwise?

/rom the moment detective David Mullican's car
ve up to 2020 Lamar Drive in answer to Henley's
ofill reporting the murder of Dean Corll, the youth
emotionally incapable of holding anything back*
Confession was his catharsis, the purgation of his
motions.

Wayne wanted to talk and so did David Brooks,
' . - teenage partner in their master-slave rela-
tionship with 33-year old Dean Corll. As they led
ce to the boat yard, to Lake Sam Rayburn and
10 High Island, pointing out pile after pile of earth
dirking the burial sites of mere kids who had been
tne victims of their three-year torture and murder
-:.rue, they were the Town Criers of death.

157

' Reporters who followed the grisly parade found
Wayne Henley eager to tell them what had hap-
pened. Brooks, less loquacious, cooperated fully with;
the police after signing a confession. His own father
had turned him over to the authorities at the first
inkling that the blond, long-haired youth had been
involved. There were no signs that the boys had ad-
mitted their part in the multiple murders under
duress.

Without their confessions the full extent of the
ghastly serious of crimes might have lain secret for
months, even years. The makeshift graves would not
have yielded their pitiful burden. If, for the parents
of the victims there. was no joy in receiving the rot-
ted flesh and withered bones of their children, at
least their doubts had been removed. One can
mourn the dead but not the unknown.

The climax, we know, of that humid August day
of contrition, was the wild, frenzied cry of the killer
as television cameras- froze on his tortured face when
he telephoned his mother, sobbing, "Mama I've
killed Dean. Be glad for me. Now, I can live."

Eventually, as the last of the bodies was un-
covered and moved in its plastic sack to the morgue,
the outdoor circus was over. The photographers put
away their cameras, the television crews packed ,
their gear and the press helicopters flew away to
other stories. In the cases of the People vs. Wayne
Henley and David Brooks, the law began to spin its
course.

A half century ago, at the time he undertook the
defense of Richard Loeb and Nathan Loepold t attor-
ney Clarence Darrow complained: "Our attention is
constantly called to the English and their way; their

158

newspapers are not permitted to publish details of
ariitaes, or refer to the suspected authors, or other-

to stir up the mob to anger against the defend-
li' In America, if the case is one of public interest,
& campaign that reeks with venom is at once
Lsxnched against the accused; columns of interviews
£rd pictures are printed each day."

What the defendant is alleged to have said is
metered in bolt type all over the pages before the

is tried, and members of the family are followed
-ibout and forced to talk. Every prospective juror
jiWed into the box knows the case and all its details.
He has all the bias of a partisan."

The Dr. Sam Shepherd murder case of two dec-
ass ago led to the Supreme Court ruling that Shep-
*ierd had not received a fair trial in his native Cleve-
j&zd because of the pressure of new stories which,
St tore his indictment, thundered for his arrest, bold-
r- accusing him of having killed his wife and hidden
-ehind his well-to-do family. Since that landmark
Vision appropriate precautions have been taken to
rmect defendants' rights to a fair trial and, in the
_3.:i. they have been observed.

What was incorrect in the first stages of the Hen-
r. -use — if indeed, there were violations of proce-

— will eventually be decided in court. To the
working newspapermen, the investigation appeared
■ have been handled within legal boundaries; the
press functioning, according to American tradition,
di: investigative arm of the police and the court,
While the Medical Examiner's office was still
Identifying bodies, and even as the search for other
*73\es continued, the Grand Jury of Harris County
-■ -rv^ned to act in the mass murder case. After po-

159

lice investigators offered their testimony, there were
mysterious appearances before the Jury by twr
young men who had known both Henley and Brooke
as well as by Rhonda Louise Williams.

The first was a young Houston seaman, Robert
Eldridge, 17, stationed at the time with the Navy n
San Diego. Eldridge said that he heard about Corll'-
death, while serving at the recruit training center ir
San Diego. He was subpoenaed by District Attorney
Carol Vance, but apparently appeared voluntarily.

When Rhonda Williams appeared before the jur>
all newsmen and photographers were excluded from
the sixth floor of the Criminal Court building. Judge
Criss Cole explained that he had acted in the bv.si
interest of the juvenile to protect her from pho-
tographs and interviews.

Most of the interest centered in the appearance oi
a youth wearing a paper sack over his head to avoid
identification. The young man had been held in the
District Attorney's office under close guard for sever-
al hours before being rushed into the court room.

The press speculated, probably correctly, that he
was Billy Ridinger, who had been named in Brooks'
confession as having escaped from Dean Corll. In his
statement, Brooks had said, "I was present at that
address (Schuler Street) when they got Billy Ri-
dinger. I took care of him while he was there. And I
believe that the only reason he is alive now is that I
begged them (Corll and Henley) not to kill him."

In another court, Wayne Henley made his first ap-
pearance at a hearing requested by his defense attor-
ney, Charles Melder. He appeared far different from
the harassed youth who a few days earlier had shown
police and newsmen the graves of his victims. He

160

ssrore a neatly pressed blue jacket, black, denim
"-users and a tooled western style brown leather
r s r He was handcuffed.

Henley, so loquacious a few days earlier, remained
• .'nt as his lawyer spoke for him and explained his
request for the hearing. "The police have treated
"n fine," he said. "We have no compiaints. But the
prisoners have been verbally abusing him. He should
re in an isolation cell." District Attorney. Vance
^reed, saying, "I have talked to the sheriff's office,
Henley will be placed in an isolation cell. It is a good
:4ea."

Bail was set at $100,000 on the first two murder
-irges which had been handed down by the Grand
"-ry. After .the proceedings Henley appeared a sad,
vected and lonely young man as he sat in a small
adding cell outside the courtroom. He sat bent over,
•znth his elbows on his knees, his head bowed.

He was overheard talking to his attorney, "I hate
- oe put in solitary. Ain't there no way to get out of
" "tc except on bond?"

I "he lawyer told him that was impossible. Then
" J en ley wanted to know if there was someone he
tfxild stay with in custody, a relative perhaps. Again
;&e lawyer told him that it was impossible.

Wayne's mother and grandmother were both in
courtroom for the hearing and Mary Henley told
-■■■porters, "I wanted to see" him. Because he hasn't
=eer. a doctor. He's cold and he isn't being fed
?=r?ugh. He hasn't any extra clothes and he hasn't
anything to blow his nose in."

As spectators crowded into the courtroom, many
were disappointed at not being able to see Wayne.
Mrs. Henley heard one young girl complain, "I

161

didn't get to see him," She retorted angrily, "Well,
he's not a monkey."

Two days later Henley and his attorney were back '!
in court as the legal skirmishing began. District At-
torney Vance had requested the court to permit an
immediate psychiatric examination of the defend-
ant. On the grounds that only the defense could
order a psychiatric evaluation of an accused person,
Charles Medler opposed the motion, protesting,
"Vance was ready for trial. He is ready for a convic-
tion."

Vance answered, "In any kind of unusual murder
case, particularly one of extremely sadistic acts as
this, you expect an insanity plea. It's best to get
ready for it."

Vance's ploy didn't work. State District Judge
William Hatten refused to order the examination
and requested the D.A. to enter legal precedents for
his argument if he intended pressing it further. The
court agreed with the youth's attorney that turning
Henley over to the county psychiatric unit for exam-
ination would violate his Constitutional rights.

Charles Medler told the judge, "I have advised my
client not to talk to anyone and I don't think he
will." Obviously the lawyer was thinking out loud,
hoping Henley would keep his mouth shut for a
change.

In contrast to the neat appearance he presented
earlier in the week Henley showed signs of wear and
tear. He wore an ill-fitting white tee shirt with r .
County Jail stenciled on, the front. His hair was un-
combed and his lawyer had to tell him to comb it.

Mrs. Henley was there again, wearing the gold
cross around her neck that reporters had noticed the

162

fat time they talked to her, the morning after
Wayne's incarceration at the precinct house in Pa-
s&dena. She spoke freely to reporters.

"Every time I get a chance to see him Fm going to
h% here," remarked the plump woman* with fair,
»ooth skin. Visits were restricted to weekends by
pH rules, but Mrs. Henley said she had stopped by
so leave her son towels, underwear and money. She
i'=ried moving out of the small frame house the fam-
ily occupied because of pressure from the neighbors.

Mrs. Henley, who had recently undergone a spiri-
tual experience, maintained, "There's no one ugly
b^rn. Everyone has been wonderful to me."

"We were living in the house when Wayne was
yym. Everyone there has known him all his life."

Afr or Judge Hatten turned down Vance's request
y.r psychiatric examination, reporters wanted to
:C:-:w what the District Attorney hoped to ac-
itmplish by the move. "If psychiatric examination
OTduced-a report stating that Henley was mentally
^competent to stand trial," Vance explained, "the
inly thing either side could do would be to ask for a
sanity hearing by a jury. If a jury found Henley in-
rcmpetent to stand trial, he would be committed to
ifeask State Hospital. He could be brought to trial if
mother jury found him sane later. But the issue of
canity at the time of the alleged murders still
x^ild be raised as a defense."

Court reporters learned that the Henley hearings
«sre being held under extraordinary security pre-
:autions. There were more than a dozen bailiffs sta-
tioned inside and outside the courtroom and the
hearing room's bullet-proof windows had been cover-
ed with paper.

163

Investigators and others connected with the case
told of receiving several mail and phone threats or
the lives of Henley and Brooks. Threats had even
come in from outside Texas. Bailiffs permitted nr-
one to enter or leave while the hearings were in
progress, but they stopped short of searching tho^
who entered.

For a couple of days there was a flurry of excite-
ment about reports that, having nipped the prosecu-
tion's attempt to get a psychiatric examination, de-
fense attorney Medler would seek out his own head
shrink and plead Henley "insane." The insanity de-
fense was eventually rejected but the trial balloor
gave Henley's spokesman a chance to say, "Aftpr
visiting Henley yesterday it is clear that he need*
medical attention — badly. He doesn't foam at the
mouth, but you can look at a person and size him
up, and the boy's not all there."

When the Grand Jury completed its investigation,
it handed down six indictments against Wayne Hen-
ley and four against David Brooks, The court then
decided to separate the cases and place Henley on
trial first.

He was named in the murders of Frank Anthony
Aguirre, 18; Homer L. Garcia, 15; Charles Gary Cob-
ble, 17; Marty Ray Jones, 18; William Ray Lawrence,
15; and Johnny Delmoe, 16.

Inevitably the constitutional rights of Brooks and
Henley would be raised and the question came fron
famed defense attorney Percy Foreman, veteran o:
numerous court trials, now 71, a big, husky, 230
pound man, still vigorous and active in Tex c ~.s
courts. Foreman, in a long career, claims to have lost
only one man to the death penalty in more than

164

' -velve hundred murder cases.

Foreman told the press that the two teenagers had
ao real understanding of their legal rights when they
. imitted their roles in the mass murder. He main-
lined that the father of Brooks also seriously dam-
ped his son's case in ordering him to sign a state-
xsnt,

"The fact that they were out there at High Is-
-ad," said Foreman, "helping dig up evidence
-rainst themselves, knowing that finding evidence

■ mid result, suggests to me that they couldn't pos-
scbly have understood their rights or they wouldn't
-juve been there."

"Regardless of the fact that they were taken be-
a magistrate and he repeated the catechism of
* -Sir rights, I don't think the young men understand
-i&k rights or they certainly wouldn't have been
" ing what they were doing, digging their own

i\ es."

''Brooks is doing what his father told him to do
-* mch is to talk and he doesn't have to. Nobody sug-
.rsts the boy tell a falsehood but the law does not
-eiuire the defendant to convict himself. He refused

sign a statement until his father told him to do

i: Tn two months or so the father will go to the
isfense attorney attempting to undo that which he
--.-■nself has done."

Fhere were extensive pretrial hearings in Houston
irer the indictment was handed down, and the

■ irt ruled that the confession and various state-
T=mis made by Henley were admissible as evidence.
It was agreed that Henley could not get a fair trial in
Houston because of the enormous press coverage, so

165

the trial was moved to San Antonio, 190 miles east
of Houston.

San Antonio was an arbitrary choice and reflected
no conviction that a fair trial could be achieved. One
Assistant District Attorney said, "A change of
venue? Where are we going to get a change of venue
to? To Canada— to London?"

The Harris County District Attorney, Carol S.
Vance, remained in charge of the prosecution. Hen-
ley's courtappointed lawyers were headed up by Will
Gray, a Houston Lawyer^ bearded, homey, clever at
courtroom strategy and well known in Texas for his
advocacy in unpopular causes.

Henley faced trial under a new Texas law which
does not provide the death penalty in mass murder
cases. Before the case even went to trial, there were
legislators who went on record as saying they would
press for changes in the law.

The new Texas "death penalty law," passed after
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that previously enact-
ed laws were unconstitutional, imposes the death
sentence under several specified conditions.

It may be invoked if the victim was a peace officer
or a fireman, slain in line of duty; if the murder was
committed during a kidnapping, burglary, robbery,
forcible rape or arson; if the case involved a hired
killer; if the murder was committed during a jail
break; if the defendant was a convict who killed a
prison employee,"

"We have an ironic situation here," one prosecu-
tor said. "A court could sentence a defendant to the
electric chair for a murder committed during a bur-
glary, but it could only assess a life term in a case in
which the defendant was accused of killing twenty-

166

-ci- en boys."

Lawyers predicted that as a result of the Houston
nurders there will be changes permitting the death
penalty for multiple murders as well as those which
zivolve other types of forcible sex offenses in addi-
T cnn to rape.

There were surprisingly few flaps in the pre-trial
■^Drk. The attorneys clashed over the jury selection,.
^;h Grey charging that one secret selection session

- -dted Henley's rights to a public trial. Gray con-
vended the publicity was just as great as in Houston

. i moved that the trial be moved out of San An-
~^nio. He also moved to void the Houston indict-
ment because there were no Mexican Americans on
T ne Grand Jury. He requested that the jury be

- r.iestered. District Court Judge Preston Dial
~,:rned down all the motions and the trial was sche-
i :'ed to start on July 9> almost eleven months to the
: - after the killing of Dean CorlL

' le final pre-trial argument involved the press.
"~zdge Preston Dial spoke contemptuously of report-
'= calling them a "bunch of locusts," He ordered
^ud-door jury selection and promptly heard from
iTs-yers for the San Antonio Express- News, the San
Vtonio Light as well as Associated Press, United
3 International and an assortment of television
- - radio stations.

Representatives of the press stated: "The U.S. Su-
preme Court has repeatedly ruled that what takes
psace in a courtroom is public property. The framers
inir Constitution distrusted Star Chamber pro-
f 5-iings and sought to bar them. We oppose this ef-
■ r to carry out judicial action behind closed doors
- ■ pledge to appeal to the highest courts to insure

167

the public's right to know."

Judge Dial maintained that permitting newsmen
to witness the questioning of jurors would eontam.
nate the jury. "I'm just not going to let the jury get
contaminated."

He also excluded Henley's mother as well as other
members of the family. He upheld the rulings in
Houston that nine oral statements Henley made fo -
lowing his arrest could be admitted in evidence.

Everything simmered down. Judge Dial let up on
banning the press and the mass murder trial was ser
to go. The prosecution said it had summoned sixt}
witnesses and probably would call thirty of them to
the stand.

The imminent start of the trial renewed an old
debate in San Antonio — whether the local new?
media increased the public's insatiable appetite f l r
the sensational or merely reflected it. The city's
newspapers as well as television stations have a well-
deserved reputation for being the most sensational
in Texas, going to extremes to emphasize crime
news, especially those crimes involving violence.

Newspapermen and TV commentators could
scarcely conceal their glee when it was decided that
San Antonio would be host to the mass murder triaL
The Henley case became the subject of banner head-
lines and extensive coverage the moment jury selec-
tion began.

It joined a barrage of similar sordid news events
occurring over the time period — automobile crashes,
domestic gun battles, bar fights. The three TV sta-
tions appear to go out of their way to photograph
pools of blood and victims of crimes and accidents in
their moments of torture, being wheeled into ambu-

168

inces and carried to safe places.

Spokesmen for the San Antonio news media, espe-
rially the local TV stations, insisted that they had
ziadc serious efforts to reduce such coverage only to
iivovor their efforts resulted in declining ratings.
I'nc ^an Antonio news stations are also in the habit
l jroing in heavily for advance plugs— putting on
several spots during the day as "teasers" for the eve-
_vnc news shows. They usually center on crime.

One of those perturbed by the approaching Henley
z*z3l was Dr. Jimmy Allen of the First Baptist
?hurch who wrote in a local newspaper: "Pandering
- n :he lowest appetites of the hearing, viewing and
--aainjf public is not a path that responsible media
should take."

" T.nere are ways of reporting the tragic dimen-
= -r»s of man's evil, without the ghastly details which
~" zept men to similar acts. But one of the reasons
- - M-nsationalism is the public appetite. Public re-
---.pse which rejects the sensationalizing of crime as
Tpste could create a different atmosphere."

While the lawyers and the court occupied them-

\ r* with legal points, Sheriff W. B. Hauck took on

- job of insuring the security of the Bexar County
Courthouse, Because of the magnitude of the case
*-eiJf Hauck decided to pull in men from other
divisions, twelve deputies. There had been no
Threats to disrupt the trial but no one was taking

-'-i us. Hauck tested the security guard around

Benley. About sixteen deputies were assigned to the

- M»d youth who, once the trial started, was
nought to court every day either in the paddy
"?&gon or a private car.

What thoughts passed through the troubled mind

169

of Wayne Henley only he could tell. As far as thr
public was concerned he had been lost in the legal
web of the law, closeted away in prison, seen only by
his mother and his lawyers. Then there was David
Brooks. What of him? His day in court was still to
come.

The terrible deeds had been committed. The con-
fessions had been made; their families lived in the
depths of despair. There are many things that
human beings cannot understand, and of all the
fathomless questions that confront and confuse men,
the most baffling is the human mind. No one can
tell what will be the outcome of any life.

Oscar Wilde wrote:

For none can tell to what Red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.

170

PART SEVEN

The Trial

"Other means of torture were pulling their
zubic hairs out one by one, shoving glass rods up
:heir penis and shoving a large bullet4ike in-
strument in the victim's rectum/' Detective Sgt
David Mullican.

Tfaey carried the torture board, the handcuffs, the
iMo, the plastic floor covering, the straps into the
:iturtroom and laid them on a large library table
sanding before the bench. There were the opening
■sremonies, the entrance of Judge Dial which
rought those doing business with the court as well
■s the crowded spectators to their feet. The indict-
ment was read and Wayne Henley listened to it in
--©ny silence, not a shade of expression on his pale,
and, passive face. His clothes fell loosely around
cis emaciated frame and his eyes were hollow and
- ~ idy 3 giving no clue to his feelings.

Then the witnesses took the stand. There was De-
fective Sgt. David Mullican of the Pasadena Police
wfco, in the calm, measured tones of the skilled, ex-
perienced witness, unfolded the tale of horror that

173

he had heard from the lips of the accused. He told of
sex molestation, torture and finally the murder of
wandering and neighborhood boys who had been
picked up by the trio of sadists, how one youth was
kept strung on a torture board for about three days,
of another who "didn't choke easy" and of the elabo-
rate techniques Corll resorted to.

There was an air of unreality as Mullican sat
there, so calmly reciting one awful fact after the
other — as though he were reading from a drama out
of the Grand Guignol, a horror story that had been
the creation of writer of the macabre. But then there
was the setting — the black-robed judge, the attor-
neys, the jury and pale, pock-marked Henley, the
prisoner, flicking not even an eyelash as the detec-
tive recalled his own words of the year before.

Mullican showed the torture board and the tool
box containing weapons which were used to seduce
the victims. Mullican testified that he and Henley
were together for roughly three days while the young
man showed him where bodies were buried in the
boatstall, Lake, Sam Rayburn and at High Island.

Mullican explained how the boys were picked up,
lured to Dean Corll's various apartments and finally
the house on Lamar Drive by promises of a party —
pienty of beer and pot,, whatever the kids wanted.
They were innocent enough — stupid, as well — to be
beguiled by the invitation and go along. Then Dean
would get out the handcuffs and appear to be play-
ing a game.

Henley told Mullican how the victims were hand-
cuffed to the torture board which was sometimes
hung on- the wall. Then their mouths were taped so
their cries for help couldn't be heard. "Henley and

174

oril used devices to sexually abuse all the victims.
>OTetimes the victims would be spread-eagled fac-
ta^ on the board, but loose a little bit so they could
~ini to one side or another."

"Often there was more than one victim: When

• ~€re were two they would be handcuffed to different
sades of the board, their hands handcuffed to one
-id and the feet to the other."

Mullican said that Henley, Corll and Brooks used
i cubber dildo on one victim, Billy Lawrence. Hen-
ry told me, 'They shoved it up his butt/ "
"Other ways of torture were pulling out their

* *bic hairs one by one." He said another means of
'ilicting pain involved taking a "large porcelain
^illet-like instrument and shoving it in" the victim's
*eecum." The detective estimated its diameter was

if and one-half inches. Handcuffs, he explained,
■fi^re used in securing the victims. "Heniey said he
rould put on the handcuffs and get out of them
demise he had the key in his back pocket. The vic-

3 didn't know about the key. "It was made to look
a game."

Mullican said Henley told him about Frank
-xuirre, one of the victims for whose murder he was
barged, who came by the Corll house. "We got him
■■ do the handcuff trick," Henley said, "But of
irsirse he didn't have a key." Then Henley related
the two laid Agutrre down on the board and
tilled him after "Dean had fun with him." By fun
Henley told Mullican he meant anal sex andxpral
x>ulation.

Mullican recalled Henley telling him that he
■ rooked Marty Jones but that it wasn't easy to choke
-rmeone to death, "like they show on TV."

175

"When I killed Marty Ray Jones,' - Henley said, "f.
had to get Dean to come arid help me."

The boys usually were kilted on the same day they
were picked up, after Corll had had his fill of abus-
ing them sexually. There was one, Billy Lawrence,
who was kept, around for three days because Dean
liked him. "Lawrence was kept chained to the board
for about that time, while Corll played with hini
repeatedly. Finally he was killed."

Mullican identified the torture instruments of the
tool box — a porcelain instrument, two glass rods, a
rubber dildo, a revolver, .22 caliber bullets, two
handcuff keys, rubber hands and a roll of adhesive
tape which were found in Corll's bedroom. They in-
serted the glass rod in the victim's penis.

Mullican testified that shortly after the first body
was found at High Island, Henley started walking
down the beach for the others. "Dig here," he said.
"I think there's one here. I can smell it."

All the bodies were buried in clear plastic. The
bodies found on the beach were buried two and three
feet deep under the sand, wrapped in plastic and
tied with a rope.

They appeared to be in sitting position. None of
the bodies was dressed. They were all completely
nude.

The detective also pointed out the wooden box
made of plywood with a hinged lid. This was the box
used to transport the bodies from Corlfs house to
the various burial sites. Corll was always careful to
back up his van to the house so witnesses could not
see the box being loaded into the van.

During Mullican's testimony, Wayne Henley, ap-
parently out of idle curiosity, began handling one of

176

handcuffs on the torture board. Suddenly he
rolled out a handkerchief and wiped the cuff clean.

1 ain't going to handle that f — thing," the

i-ller said as he quickly dropped it back on the

i&ble.

m Henley's written statement the court was told,
[ killed several of the boys myself with Dean's gun
i.id helped to strangle some. I don't remember the
zMes. There are too many of them. Some of them
w&re hitchhikers and I don't remember their
jsj&sssies."

Henley said that he had been introduced to Corll
: y David Brooks when he was fourteen and that Corll
■ Id him he was associated with an "organization in
I alias that bought and sold boys" and he offered
"*V,ne two hundred dollars for any boy Wayne
±%M bring him — "more if the kid was good look-

^ ■ --

The confession said Henley did nothing about the
~"rr for a year but then needed money "for my peo-
-ale," So he helped Dean Corll pick up a hitchhiker.
"I had long hair and all and it was easier for me to
-■=_k to them."

Henley helped trick the hitchhiker into trying ori
"jse handcuffs, and then left him with Corll, He was
pud two hundred dollars. It wasn't until several
later that Henley learned that the boy had
-■ten killed by his-friend.. .

!That was the end of the two hundred -dollar pay-
ees* ts. Afterward, Dean never paid Wayne more
" sail five or ten dollars for procuring a* boy. But that
i£fib \ appear to make much difference for,, by this
rsae, Henley himself was involved in the sex games

: the older man and had tied himself completely

177

into his lifestyle. Except when they were '"fussirr
they saw each other constantly and Corll was
frequent a visitor to the Henley house as Wayne wss
to his.

Linking victims from the Heights with WajTte
were the statements from parents and neighbor?
like Mrs. Shirley Dollens who lived in the same
apartment complex as Marty Jones and Chaile^
Cobble, the two youths who teamed up after Cob i
had a dispute with his parents.

She said that on the night they were last seen that
she had been sitting by the pool when both Mar->
and Charles passed by in the company of a th^
boy. They were normally very friendly, she testified,
but Cobble gave her a "very strange look. I diem":
know how to decipher it." She described the th_-_
boy as having dark brown hair and a slight mous-
tache. When District Attorney Carol Vance pom!e;
to Wayne Henley and asked if he were the boy sht
saw with Cobble and Jones, the" woman answered
"He looked similar. But I can't say certainly that
was."

Cobble's mother, Mrs. Betty Cobble, and the
stepfather of Johnny Delome also testified as well -?
Louis Garcia, the father of Homer Garcia.

Garcia, remembered taking his son- to a Houslor
driver education class the night of July 17, 1973, and
that his son generally called up after class to br
picked up. The youth called as usual and had 3
short talk with Mrs. Garcia, but that was the last
ther of the senior Garcias ever saw of their son.

The proprietor of the Houston driving school pr.
duced records indicating Wayne Henley was also
enrolled in the school and that he had attended

178

r v *£ses on the night Homer Garcia disappeared:
On the stand, Mrs. Cobble identified -a pair of
^5 jeans, a belt, a blue knit shirt with a white

seagull emblem, an<f a pair of shoes as belonging to
son and a pair of brown pants belonging to
irty Jones. The clothes were found in the

y^-shed.

n^-jietly, in a soft voice Mrs. Cobble said she last
*i-s- her son in the afternoon of July 25. "These are
nants . . . this is his belt . . . these are his

Mr=. Josephine Aguirre began to sob unebntrolla-
S&r when Vance questioned her about her son,
Frssik. She could answer no questions and was led
t,." "*f the courtroom. i.
Betty" Joe Shirley, mother of Marty Jones, iden-
^f,«d several articles of clothing as those of her son.
-ion a Houston homicide detective, K. D.
-net, took the stand to testify that he took samples
■ •'■".dyne Henley's pubic and head hair, there were
pactions from defense attorney Will Gray,

y were overruled and Porter testified that
:y didn't want to give the hair samples, but
~rr told him the police had the right to take
tkm . He admitted that he had not contacted Hen-

- Forney before taking the sample.

A-i explained that they were like fingerprints
*r m . we were from the state and we had a right to
them." The intent of obtaining the samples
v -n match Henley's hair with that found in the

- "i- bags containing the murdered victims.
Another expert witness was Fred Rymer, a

'-Vi—ns identification specialist, who testified that
?iEets that killed Cobble and Garcia were .22

179

caliber and came from the revolver identified a=
Corll's, the same gun Henley used to kill GorlL

During recesses, Henley moved around the court
■room and occasionally talked to newsmen whom he
had come to regard as friends. However, unlike their
previous meetings, he avoided direct questions in-
volving the case.. He was neatly dressed with a clear,
shirt, several collar sizes too large and a wide striped
tie. His hair was combed and as the spectators con-
stantly remarked, "He looks just like any other kid

Henley told reporters that he got along "great
with the officers who took him back and forth from
jail, He ducked questions about the reports that tb
other inmates taunted and insulted him .

At one recess Henley picked up the packages of
hair submitted for evidence, took them up as though
to get a better light. Then he put them back and re
turned to his chair.

The impression he gave was that of a totally calrr
self-possessed . young man. Even when the parents o:
his victims told of the last times they saw their sons
and broke down at the bitterness of the memory,
Henley's serenity never deserted him. When Mrs,
Josephine Aguirre had to be led from the courtroom,
Wayne simply stared into space and did not look at
her.

Then came Houston *s medical Examiner Dr. Jo-
seph A. Jachimczyk who told of the autopsies he
performed on five of Henley's victims. He said Frank
Anthony. Aguirre and John Ray Dolome died from a
lack of air, although Delome might also have died
from a gunshot wound in the head.

When asked what happens to a person with a gag
stuffed in his mouth and his nose covered with tape.

180

1m* physician replied, "He can't breathe, and he
fes of air hunger." The person would die in three or
f:cr minutes and would be conscious one or two
isinute&j as long as he is capable of holding his

"T?3Th."

The pathologist said that one of the other victims
h& examined was shot, and the two others were shot
iri strangled.

Going into further detail, Jachimczyk said that
face of Frank Aguirre was completely covered
Tt-fh adhesive tape, there was a gag in his mouth
*j&d a hangman's noose around his neck. Johnny
1*1 me had adhesive tape over his eyes, nose and
smith. "There was a gag in his mouth," said the
^uCtor. "Wrapped around his arms and legs were
- r*> strips of rope. There was a gunshot wound at the
lodge of the nose between the eyes,"

'The bodies of both boys were little more than skel*
'fens, he said. Both bodies were recovered from the
Ttescfa at High Island. The bodies of Jones and Cob-
tth were found at the boatshed. Garcia's was dug up
it Lake Sam Ray burn.

Fireworks exploded in Judge Preston Dial's court-
f>tc: when, after the trial had been under way for
aSteut three days, the jurist heard the astonishing
m*&s that the media had attempted to contact some
tcrors. It will be recalled that Dial refused to order
ge jurors sequestered. Defense attorney Will Gray
jac&aiptly moved for a mistrial.

ledge Dial then questioned the jury of six men
»d sm women about telephone calls made to them
i£ their homes. They told the judge that reporters

181

had talked to members of their family and identified
them as representing the San Antonio Light, The
newsmen wanted to know how the trial had affected
the jurors' home life and whether it had caused any
hardships.

Peter Franklin, assistant managing editor of the
paper, in court on assignment from the Light, wa>
summoned to the witness stand. He said that he ha -
heard of the phone calls to the jurors but that t: -
assignment had not originated with him.

i>ray contended the jury had been prejudiced ]
the calls since the news media did not general):,
make such calls and that "the mere fact that *
newspaper has seen fit to contact these relatives in-
dicates to the jurors the sensationalism of the case

Judge Dial denied Gray's motion for a mistrial bu
promised to take under consideration Gray's mo^e
that the relatives of the jurors who spoke to reporter-
be subpoenaed to testify about the matter.

Throughout the trial, the strategy of defense attor^
ney Will Gray had been to object. During the testi-
mony of the experts, Detective Sergeant Mullican,
the Medical Examiner, the ballistics expert and
others, Gray arose time and time again to raise ob-
jections. On one day newsmen, until they wearied of
counting, tabulated more than a hundred objections
by Gray.

He called no witnesses to the stand although in
the pretrial publicity it was anticipated that he
would want to question about thirty. In the last days
of the trial he cross-examined Harris County Medi-
cal Examiner, Dr. Joseph A. Jachimczyk, about the

182

tedy identification, hoping to throw doubts on the
ware's charges against Henley, He was seeking to
:~*credit identification on the legal grounds that
can be no prosecution for a murder of an uni-
^totified victim.

Gray wanted to know if the Medical Examiner's
■.tfice had made an error in that another pathologist
*id given a different opinion as to the cause of the
Math of Homer Garcia, who was shot and strangled.

The other pathologist, Dr. Jack Pruitt, ruled that
-S&rcia died from strangulation and suffocation. Ja-
-Eaxmczyk said that in an autopsy performed five
iays after Pruitt's, he found that Garcia died from
Tffiree gunshot wounds, two to the left side of the
•:•*&£ and one to the chest. When asked to explain
!■= contradiction, the physician replied, "Pruitt was
z _:rrect."

The Medical Examiner testified that the skeletal
iins of Aguirre and Delome, along with the
ichers, had been identified chiefly by using dental
^c^rds. "We were furnished about 250 to 300 inqui-
3*s.«n missing persons. We checked that informa-
nt against our skeletal remains. We requested the
i^k^es of dentists who may have treated the missing
>ssons and obtained their records. We then com-
$&r&d the records with the X-rays and photos we
made. We also inquired about clothing to see if that
*:*dd help/'

Jachimczyk toid Gray that identification of the
ifr-dies hinged on the opinion of the person who
- ide the comparison of the dental records.

"Then if his opinion is wrong, the identification is
^mgT' Gray asked. The physician agreed.

Jachimczyk conceded during Gray's cross- ex -

183

amination that the skeletal remains identified, as
Delome could have been the partial remains of one
person combined with the partial remains of another
person "depending on who picked up the remains."

The trial ended after only a week, during which
the state did all the talking. District Attorney Vance
interrogated twenty-five witnesses and introduced
eighty-two pieces of evidence,

"It just seemed like a good thing to do," Will Gray
told reporters but would not elaborate under a court-
ordered gag rule. "We've got nothing to gain by put-
ting on testimony and helping the state," he added.

In the summation for the state, Carol Vance
based his plea for a guilty verdict on. the evidence
and Henley's written confession.

He pointed out that the statement, giving the
names and circumstances of the six victims was
made August 9, 1973, before the bodies had been
found, identified, or subjected to autopsy. In each
case, the manner of death in the statement — shoot-
ing or strangling— matched the later autopsy report.

"There was no way on God's earth that they (the
police who were taking the statement) could have
known those things when they wrote them down,"
said the Assistant District Attorney Don L. Lam-
bright.

He asked the jurors, in an emotional appeal, to
remember the testimony about how the victims were
bound, raped and tortured before they were killed —
one for as long as three days.

"I would hope that you give those little boys their

184

4sy in court." .

He also mentioned the mother of one of the vic-
r aas who was led from the stand during her testimo-
rt. "There's not a solitary thing you can do to help
re^ You can't bring her boy back. But you can hurt
i-' And I believe she's been hurt enough."

\\ l ien it came time for Gray to make his plea to
■Jie jury, he asked them to judge the evidence dis-
la^wnately, "You have heard an appeal to every

- 5i and prejudice known to humanity, but your
: -iy as jurors is to put all that aside.'*

Grny criticized the physical evidence presented,
wy^ a box allegedly used to transport the bodies
; \ .( Lims was too small and that the alleged torture

ard showed no signs of blood.

: -*p also pointed out as "remarkable** that arrest-
.r^ er fleers could remember self-incriminating oral
i^ate merits by Wayne Henley for the first time as
*sa:g as seven months after the statements were alle-
, U> made.

"Trnv, however, did not discuss the written confes-

- Since Henley had not taken the stand, there
^ "o opportunity for him to deny making it.

1 Mtiraony during the pre-trial hearing indicated
-~a r Henley did not see a lawyer for sixty hours after
reported shooting Corll, although the Henley
fstn;ly lawyer sought twice to reach him by tele-
— "o.

ru r officers testified that Henley was fully ad-
of his legal rights and never requested to speak
a a attorney before giving the statement,
-ny contended that the officers* testimony about
-"t?r.iey T s conversations with them violated the Texas
Ltf-w which states in part that a defendant's oral ad-

185

missions of guilt must lead to the recovery of phys:
cal evidence before they can be related to a jur>
Gray maintained that the physical evidence in tht
case was recovered from Corll's home before Henle>
told officers about them.

The state answered that officers weren't aware
the significance of the torture board, body box and
the tool box instruments before Henley described
what thjey were used for.

Will Gray watchers — and there were plenty of
them among' Texas lawyers — were fascinated by h.>
strategy. They believed he was certain he could gr*
another trial for his client on an appeal, because o:
what he felt were reversible errors, In presenting dt -
fense testimony Gray would have afforded the judge
an opportunity to cure the errors.

For the good people of San Antonio the Bexar
County courthouse had been a focal point of interest
in an exciting week. Each morning spectators braved
the blazing heat to crowd outside the 120-seat court-
room, jockeying for position to push through the
door when the bailiff opened the door.

The crowd represented a cross-section of the
Texas city, including the courthouse regulars whc
knew the language, who could translate the legal
strategy for the uninitiated. There were old men hi
straw hats and torn overalls, mothers with their chiL
dren, teen-age girls. They couldn't quite explain
what had drawn thfem to the trial with its unpleas-
ant overtones of sexual abuse, strangling, torture
and shooting, of young bodies covered with lime and
thrown into sandy graves.

186

They were an orderly crowd. No one pushed ahead
af the otr^er, and a great many seemed to be friends.
< Ilbere were quite a few young people. One of them
•j&d, "1 was visiting here in San Antonio and decid-
-i to stay over. You don't get close to a thing like
■^sis every day — a really terrible mass murder. But it
^n't just that kid who's on trial here, it seems to me.
Bat the whole of society.

"We make the runaways. I was one of them my-
«it'. I know what can happen to a kid when he's
*.«Fung and leaves home and doesn't know what to
I can see where some guy like Dean Corll could
|Bt close to him. Kids think they're so smart.
" -.-yVe got a lot to learn. I had to learn it the hard
n\\ and I wish I didn't. I've been busted. I've done
Eime* I don't recommend it."

Thsn there was the foreign journalist who couldn't
r * i permanent press seat inside. A colleague sup-
-Ssd him with his coverage of the actual trial, while
it* collected material from the onlookers and around

be city. "They go crazy about this kind of story in
£.rs?ope today. It didn't used to be. We used to have
4 ^ of respect for Americans. This is the kind of
■ ,:r?r case that ought to come out of England;
- - /ere — in California with that Corona fellow
teed this — just a couple of kids and a dirty man. Yio-
he** 1 . That's all you see on television. Crime on the
That's all people talk about it. It's hard to

* :-:=-:nnd. I guess it*s because we expect so much
xi America and Americans. It's a shame. That's
$b£t — a terrible shame* I'm sorry for you."

fee young man, about twenty, came every day
•few- Sometimes he got inside; other days he
' ■ *t. He spoke to no one. Finally he said, "It. 'was

187

quite a few years ago; Dean Corll tried to pick m\:
up. I knew it was him from the newspaper stories
He was in that candy truck. One of those kids could
have been me."

"I don't know why Fm here. Just curious/* said
one mother who had managed to find a seat every
day of the trial. "I did jury duty about a month ago;
it involved a child abuse case. That got me interest-
ed- I thought I'd see what this case was like. And
I've 'got a young son of my own. I felt I had a special:
interest in this kind of thing."

An older woman who admitted she had been com-
ing to court for years said, "It helps pass the time.
Gives me something to do. I have a small pension. I
live in a boarding house. I don't have housework. So
I come here. It's cheap and it's fascinating." But she
admitted she couldn't take some of the testimony.
"It was terrible. I had to shut my eyes lots of times. I
couldn't stand what they kept saying about those in-
struments shoved in the body."

For the spectators who gained admission to the
courtroom the center of interest was Wayne Henley.
They kept staring at him, watching to see his reac-
tions. But he disappointed them. Henley's com-
posure sustained him throughout the week and the
curious could only keep muttering, "he looks so or-
dinary—just like any other kid. But you never
know .. . . you never can tell. .

Lost in the sea of humanity swarming over the
courthouse (always carefully guarded) was Mary
Henley. She was denied admission to the proceed-
ings because of having been subpoened as a witness.
Mrs. Henley never took the stand. She told one re-
porter, "You know, it's terribly lonely out here, ail

188

i-Otne." And her voice trailed away.

There wasn*t much doubt of their verdict when
jury retired fox its deliberations. They had heard
t "w-'cek of prosecution testimony and a day of sum-
— prions by the two sides. The defense presented no
"astimony. The pallid 18-year-old junior high school
znpcuT, accused in participating in the sexual tor-
--Tt of at least twenty-six boys, had been specifical-
> charged with six of them* He had not testified in
l_s own behalf. The jurors had seen a written state-
tirzi: he made after his arrest the year before. They
» *:ed at evidence. This was the case.

The jury deliberated less than ninety minutes be-

r~ they reached their verdict of guilty. Under
7fi33 law they would reconvene the following day to
Witrmine the punishment.

' dyne Henley received the news with the same
*~ ,:ism and lack of emotion that had marked his
rasduct throughout the triaL He smiled and joked
his attorneys afterward. In the back of the

'.r..-:-um, Mary Henley, his three younger brothers
ms& nis grandmother wept.

trough her tears, Betty Shirley, mother of one of
fee victims, said, "I'm just so happy. Thank the
. ilaank the people. Thank the state. Thank
jov^ody around/'

J4iry Henley had a final word for reporters who
. s ■ red around her, "I believed he was innocent
&tsi the beginning. And I'll always believe it."

Tft£ following day the jurors deliberated only fifty
tl - _t£s before returning to the court and recom-
'Wrocd that Henley be sentenced to six 99-year

189

prison terms— the maximum under Texas law — out
term for each of the boys he was convicted of mur
dering.

Under Texas law, Henley could apply for parole m
eight years and four months. Court experts pointed
out that multiple sentences of more than sixty years*
are considered as one for parole purposes.

Before the jury began considering the sentence
District Attorney Carol Vance said, "I apologize to
the jurors that the laws of the state of Texas do not,
permit the death penalty in these cases." He told
the jury that Henley was a monster who deserved to-
be removed from society. He called the case "dis-
gusting, sickening and repulsive. It's the most ex-
treme example of man's inhumanity to man I've
ever seen."

According to members of the jury only one vote
was needed on Henley's guilt or innocence. There
was never any consideration given to a light sen-
tence despite the best efforts of defense attorney
Gray to paint Dean Corll as the "monster master-
mind" of the trio. They were inclined to believe that
Henley was in full possession of . his faculties and
that he had acted with malice. If they had believed
there was no malice involved in the six killings he
could have received a five to fifteen year sentence on
each count.

Judge Dial had kind words for the peppery defense
offered by Will Gray. He said, 'Tve- never seen a
defense attorney with as keen an eye for potential
weakness in a trial proceedings." The judge wel-
comed Gray's promise of appeal, hoping that it
would serve to clarify Texas law in respect to the ad-
missibility of oral statements by defendants.

190

The trial was a surprise to everyone. It went
sickly. There were no legal hitches, few hang-ups,
m explosions, But the Houston Mass Murder will be
a the courts for years to come. There is the case of
David Brooks, for example, still unresolved. His
counsel, Ted Musick, maintains that Brooks is men-
tally incompetent to stand trial and was insane at
t ; me of the murders. And, of course, there will
~£ the appeals in the Henley case.

Things are pretty much back to normal on the
heights these days. When it is hot, which is often,
~he sun pours down on the tired, neglected frame
!*euses of the working people who live there. The
amdscaping isn't much, just what you'd expect to
lad in a part of town that isn't especially well cared
rr The grass looks as though it could do with a lake
xll of water, the trees bend in tired dejection and
!s€re are pot holes in the streets.

The bars are the center of social life in the
teii-rht-s, bars where they serve big schooners of beer
-Texas-style, in glasses that are iced in the refriger-
trr. No dark beer here — just light brew that doesn't
iste too heavy. You hear the same country songs on
fes jukebox day after day— scratchy fiddles bump-
5£f into singers who make up with lung power what
kr? lack in vocal agility. But no one notices, so no
-■ gets tired of the constant din. They're barely
ifi&ie to hear themselves ta!k.

"'We're glad it's over/' they say time and time
apoi. as though thinking it will make sure that it's
jt&e& and won't arise once more to intrude on their
. ■ 7 - workaday lives. You hear few words of sympa-

191

thy for Wayne Henley. People seem to agree that the
ninety-nine year sentence was what he deserved* No
one raised the question of his sanity, and David
Brooks has all but been forgotten. It's as though it
was just one of those things, that it was in the cards
for him to rot away in a jail or mental institution.

Then there are the vocal ones, the loud voices
spurred on by their liquor. "Gas chamber's too good
for him," they mutter over and over. "Best thing
would be to lynch him. Leave him slowly hanging in
the breeze — like they say over there in Washington/'

In the Heights and Houston generally there's a
feeling of agreement with District Attorney Caroi
Vance,; "This could have happened anywhere." They
wish, though, that it hadn't happened to them. The
feeling is that the murder ring was a random in-
trusion, the accidental conjunction of a vicious older
man and two willing teen-age accomplices who es-
caped detection for three years. They do not dwell
on the sex aspects of the case; for some, it appears
beyond their comprehension. It is an enigma, an
event they can neither explain nor understand.

The Heights was represented at the trial in San
Antonio. Besides the mothers who testified there
were others, like the parents whose son has been
missing for eight months and though he was never
identified as one of the victims, they are convinced
he was.

The father believes that his boy is buried on High
Island, that lonely stretch of beach along the Gulf of
Mexico where Wayne Henley and David Brooks
pointed out the graves of six bodies. On free days he
takes a shovel and goes there to search. "I been
down there a lot," he said, "Walking and digging,

192

walking and digging."

k Parents Community Center was one result of
Ehe killings. It has been set up in the Heights as an
emergency shelter for runaways. About fifteen run-
jnrays live there on money scratched from the Feder-
£ government, the state, the city and by way of do-
actions. "It isn't much," said one Heights old-timer,
rut it's a step in the right direction. It shows,
-3>be» that we've learned something,"

Just what has been learned from the worst mass
border in U, S. history is open to question— not one
7i_r. many questions.

k these pages we have heard from a number of
z^-p'e, police, psychiatrists, killers, victims, young
z#c ole. They speak in different voices, each atten-
we to his own interests, preoccupied with his own
;r-"btem.

The runaway is dissatisfied at home, hence he be-
_«aes a runaway. The modern parent is incapable of
-training his children. The police are overbuy
:s-ed. Psychiatrists blame sexual repression for the
atat to kill. Modern society, some day, is at fault.
Let us return to God and moral values" is the cry

She religious.

There are no set answers.

All we can be sure of is that there were twenty-six
pmmg victims, tortured, murdered, buried in shal-
es- graves, their bodies covered with lime-
It is quiet and peaceful along the Bolivar Peninsu-
la* at High Island, the village sitting atop a knoll at
&e end of the Peninsula, Out on the littered beach
jpa can see the family groups as they sit around

193

driftwood fires struggling to stay alive in the oc-
casional showers. The people fish and wade in the
lazy surf.

You can find good fishing at Rollover pass,
flounders and sand trout.

And then there are the busy ones— the people
crowding into the stores at Crystal beach, Gilchrest,
High Island and other stops along the stretch of
Highway 97 from Bolivar to High Island, They pile
out of their cars and into the taverns, turn on the
jukebox, sip their Texas-style beer in frozen glasses,
toss coke to the kids.

,Now and then someone asks, "Is this the place?"

What comes back is a reluctant "yep" and that
about does it. They don't want to be reminded of it
—not at High Island or anyplace else along the
Highway -the thirty-five miles once travelled by
Wayne and David and Sergeant Mullican—travelled
by men and machinery who dug into the sand for
hours on end, recoiling from the stench, their hands
encased in rubber gloves, their mouths aflame with
bright cigars from which there bellowed streams of
smoke to fight the smell. Then,, gently, they lift
their burdens out of the earth— slippery, slimy plas-
tic bags of bones and rotted flesh.

But the lonely father from the Heights is there-
walking and digging, walking and digging.

No one notices him.

194

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